A newly-discovered spiral galaxy, dubbed the Big Wheel, formed just 2 billion years after the big bang – far earlier, considering its size, than astronomers thought possible.

Themiya Nanayakkara, at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, says the discovery was an accident. He and his colleagues were looking for quasars, energetic regions at the heart of some galaxies, with the James Webb Space Telescope in November 2022 when a “large spiral galaxy popped up”.