According to study co-author Alice E. Shapley of UCLA, "The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks.

The unusual spiral morphology of BX442 was discovered using images obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope by a team of astronomers led by David R. Law of the University of Toronto.

Small Doppler shifts of the light between different samples showed that BX442 was indeed a spiral disk, rotating roughly as fast as the Milky Way Galaxy, but much thicker and forming stars more rapidly.

Current wisdom holds that such grand-design spiral galaxies simply didn't exist at such an early time in the history of the Universe."

However, the chaotic motions of the stars in the youthful BX442 suggest that, if this is the case, the present spiral structure will not be long-lived in cosmic terms, and may have disappeared within a hundred million years or so.