The very first galaxies weren't flat discs like ours—they were shaped like long, skinny cigars.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.13700
The Takeaway
By analyzing stellar motion with the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers proved that early 'flattened' galaxies aren't just tilted pancakes, but actually three-dimensional spindle-like shapes. This reveals a fundamental, previously unknown stage in how the Milky Way and other galaxies originally evolved.
From the abstract
The Universe is now extensively populated by discy galaxies with coherent galaxy-wise stellar rotation. This disc prevalence has been deemed a late-time phenomenon because the penetrating cold gaseous streams in the early Universe ($z\gtrsim 2$) fuel the star formation in galaxies too intensively to allow for thin disc formation. However, recent images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) unveiled a prominent population of low-mass galaxies at high redshifts with flattened shapes, wide