{"id":211562,"date":"2025-04-16T09:07:06","date_gmt":"2025-04-16T14:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-most-distant-and-earliest-milky-way-twin-ever-seen-meet-dragon-galaxy-zhulong-image"},"modified":"2025-04-16T09:07:06","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T14:07:06","slug":"james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-most-distant-and-earliest-milky-way-twin-ever-seen-meet-dragon-galaxy-zhulong-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-most-distant-and-earliest-milky-way-twin-ever-seen-meet-dragon-galaxy-zhulong-image","title":{"rendered":"James Webb Space Telescope discovers most distant and earliest Milky Way \u2018twin\u2019 ever seen. Meet dragon-galaxy Zh\u00fal\u00f3ng (Image)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-most-distant-and-earliest-milky-way-twin-ever-seen-meet-dragon-galaxy-zhulong-image.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe named this galaxy Zh\u00fal\u00f3ng, meaning \u2018Torch Dragon\u2019 in Chinese mythology. In the myth, Zh\u00fal\u00f3ng is a powerful red solar dragon that creates day and night by opening and closing its eyes, symbolizing light and cosmic time,\u201d team leader Mengyuan Xiao of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) said in a statement. \u201cWhat makes Zh\u00fal\u00f3ng stand out is just how much it resembles the <a data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/19915-milky-way-galaxy.html\" data-before-rewrite-localise=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/19915-milky-way-galaxy.html\">Milky Way<\/a> in shape, size, and stellar mass.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Another similarity between the Milky Way and this early cosmic dragon galaxy is the sizes of their stellar disks and the masses of those regions. Zh\u00fal\u00f3ng\u2019s disk spans around 60,000 <a data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/light-year.html\" data-before-rewrite-localise=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/light-year.html\">light-years<\/a> and has a mass of 100 billion times that of <a data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/42649-solar-mass.html\" data-before-rewrite-localise=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/42649-solar-mass.html\">the sun. The Milky Way\u2019s disk is slightly wider at 100,000 light-years<\/a> wide with a stellar mass estimated at around 46 billion solar masses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWe named this galaxy Zh\u00fal\u00f3ng, meaning \u2018Torch Dragon\u2019 in Chinese mythology. In the myth, Zh\u00fal\u00f3ng is a powerful red solar dragon that creates day and night by opening and closing its eyes, symbolizing light and cosmic time,\u201d team leader Mengyuan Xiao of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) said in a statement. \u201cWhat makes Zh\u00fal\u00f3ng stand [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}