That’s when she stumbled on the galaxy with two perfectly symmetrical spiral arms. They found it had a prominent disk with two clear spiral arms and a small central bulge. They also found that new stars formed along the spiral arms at about equivalent to 60 stars of our sun’s mass every year. This confirmed Alaknanda was a fully developed spiral galaxy, and only 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Since our own Milky Way is called Mandakini in Hindi and is also a spiral galaxy, I named this one Alaknanda,” she said.

Source: The Hindu December 29, 2025 13:44 UTC