📄 Showing the "Simple" version — "Popular" is not ready yet. Add it to favorites to help prioritize it. Ask for the full read

On a playground, a merry-go-round has just been set spinning. In the first moments, kids are still crowding, grabbing the rails, and the overall picture is chaos. But a couple of seconds later, centrifugal force lines them up in a circle, giving the motion a clear shape. Young galaxies were thought to behave much the same way: in the early universe, they should have been shapeless clouds of gas and stars, only later, over billions of years, turning into elegant rotating disks like our Milky Way.

The James Webb Space Telescope peered back to when the universe was between 600 million and a billion years old and photographed a hundred such 'infants.' To avoid relying on the human eye, the scientists trained a neural network architect: first, it cleaned the images of noise and distortions, like a restorer removing soot from an old fresco, and then it sorted galaxies into 'pancakes' and 'clumps.' The neural network proved incorruptible: it didn't look for familiar patterns but saw only geometry.

The result was surprising: 34 out of 100 galaxies were already disks. Not loose blobs, but fully formed 'carousels' where stars and gas obediently circle a center. Moreover, this proportion held for both the lightest and the heaviest galaxies in the sample. This means that the spinning mechanism, angular momentum, kicks in almost immediately after the big bang and works far more efficiently than models predicted.

The discovery adds puzzles: how did matter manage to organize into orderly structures when everything around was still seething with explosions and mergers? Perhaps the first disks were born not from chaos but along thin filaments of dark matter that served as ready-made guides. Either way, the cosmic playground turned out to be far more orderly than we thought, and its merry-go-rounds started spinning almost right away.