Not clumpy, chaotic but earliest galaxies were remarkably organised, discovery shows

3 min readPuneUpdated: Jul 14, 2026 08:27 PM IST

Astronomers from Pune's IUCAA have discovered that the earliest spheroidal galaxies already followed the Kormendy relation, a key law governing galaxy structure. (File Photo)

When the Universe was still in its infancy, galaxies were expected to be clumpy, chaotic, rapidly evolving systems still trying to settle down. But new observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal that some of the earliest galaxies had already become remarkably organised.

Astronomers from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, recently discovered that the earliest ‘spheroidal’ galaxies already obeyed one of astronomy’s fundamental law of galaxy architecture — the ‘Kormendy relation’, which links a spheroidal (rounded) galaxy’s size to its surface brightness.

Simply put, this discovery provides a powerful new benchmark for theories explaining formation of galaxies. According to IUCAA researchers, future simulations must explain not only how the earliest massive galaxies formed so rapidly, but also why they already obeyed the same underlying structural laws that continue to govern galaxies nearly 13 billion years later.

The team studied publicly available deep JWST images of hundreds of very distant galaxies that existed during the early phases of our cosmic history, when the Universe’s age was between ∼ 400-900 million years old. By carefully measuring how these galaxies’ brightness is spread out, they tested whether these baby galaxies also obeyed this well-established relation seen in nearby galaxies.

The Kormendy relation states that brighter the central surface brightness the more compact it is. The new findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, show that galaxies began to be organised remarkably early in cosmic history, less than one billion years after the Big Bang.

Dr Anshuman Borgohain, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral fellow at IUCAA, in an official statement issued on Tuesday, said the unprecedented capabilities of JWST continue to reveal exciting findings about the earliest galaxies which challenge our current understanding of how they grew and evolved in an infant Universe. Our findings will directly contribute toward setting a new benchmark for understanding early galaxy assembly.”

Prof Kanak Saha, who supervised the project, said, “For decades, astronomers have used scaling relations such as the Kormendy relation as ‘fossil records’ of galaxy evolution. These relations encode how gravity, star formation, mergers, and gas dynamics shape galaxies over cosmic time. Until JWST, astronomers could measure these relations only for relatively nearby galaxies or those seen several billion years after the Big Bang. The first billion years remained largely unexplored because previous telescopes lacked the sensitivity and resolution needed to study such distant systems. JWST has now opened that frontier”.