(Phys.org) July 18, 2012 -- Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a spiral galaxy in the early universe, billions of years before many other spiral galaxies formed. In findings reported July 19 in the journal Nature, the astronomers said they discovered it while using the Hubble Space Telescope to take pictures of about 300 very distant galaxies in the early universe and to study their properties. This distant spiral galaxy is being observed as it existed roughly three billion years after the Big Bang, and light from this part of the universe has been traveling to Earth for about 10.7 billion years.
"As you go back in time to the early universe, galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric," said Alice Shapley, a UCLA associate professor of physics and astronomy, and co-author of the study. "The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?"
"The fact that this galaxy exists is astounding," said David Law, lead author of the study and Dunlap Institute postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. "Current wisdom holds that such 'grand-design' spiral galaxies simply didn't exist at such an early time in the history of the universe." A 'grand design' galaxy has prominent, well-formed spiral arms."
http://phys.org/news...-discovery.html
Right. It's not supposed to be there but it is. The fact is that mature spiral galaxies are viewed from one end of the universe (i.e. Andromeda) to the farthest reaches and even beyond the 'redshift desert' 6 to 9 billion light yrs out.

According to current theory, spiral galaxies take about 2 to 3 million yrs to make a single complete turn and they begin to spin out and dissipate as recognizable spirals in no later than 5 to ten million yrs. So none of the spiral galaxies that are beyond that time frame should appear to us. By analogy, this problem is equal to all of us waking up tomorrow morning only to discover that every human being on earth appears to be between 25 to 35 yrs of age. So the first logical question we would have: "Where are all the children? Where are all the older folks?
Hubble Deep Space has provided us with a clear picture of the problem:
