The Webb Space Telescope started the New Year in a similar way to us humans, by taking pictures of bright bursts of color in the sky. Well, not so much “in the sky”—the Webb itself is a million miles from Earth, and its targets are even further away. But a state-of-the-art space observatory recently imaged two grand design spiral galaxies, and one appears to be the most distant yet known.

Researchers have written papers on two large spiral galaxies, both at the moment hosted on the preprint server arXiv. One of the ancient galaxies is called A2744-GDSp-z4; the other—more distant—is called Zhúlóng, from the red dragon god in Chinese mythology. Both spiral galaxies were recently discovered and are grand design spiral galaxiesa type of spiral galaxy with very well-defined arms. Spiral galaxies with less obvious arms are called flocculent spiral galaxies. For reference, our Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxyalthough researchers continue to investigate its exact structure and what label best suits it.

A2744-GDSp-z4 (sorry, no fun nickname) can be seen below in Webb’s composite images. The galaxy weighs about 14 billion solar masses and has a surprisingly developed structure for its age. The existence of the galaxy suggests that even 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang—that is, early in the universe—a well-known spiral galaxy already exists. Although the spiral arms are not very clear to our eyes, you can see the general shape, especially in the leftmost image. The galaxy was found in the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, one of Webb’s earliest scientific targets and that bore fruit before equally distant galaxies.

Zhúlóng, pictured in pink at the top of this article, is “the most distant bulge+disk galaxy with spiral arms known to date,” according to the paper. It has a mass similar to the Milky Way (which is above average for an early galaxy) and has a relatively low star formation rate. The grand-design spiral produces only about 66 solar masses per year. That finding is interesting when paired with earlier Webb telescope data that SHOW ancient galaxies are metal-poor and very gassy. Perhaps Zhúlóng, despite its size, lacks the right properties for a faster rate of star formation.

The superlatively grand-design spirals are so far apart, that they appear pixellated in the Webb images. Part of the reason the Webb can see such distant objects is that it is used gravitational lens—regions of spacetime with such intense gravity that they bend light, allowing us to see objects behind them. When the light bends, it is refocused—magnified—for telescopes like Webb.

In other words, even though the massive galaxies appear like blobs, the images are amazing, and Webb is acting perfectly normal. The nearby galaxies imaged by the telescope appear in sharper relief. Below is a slider showing how the Webb instruments reveal different aspects of a grand design spiral galaxy. The image on the left was taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, while the image on the right was taken by MIRI, the telescope’s mid-infrared imager. NIRCam captures the warmer light from newly formed stars, while MIRI captures the galaxy’s light from cool grains of dust and gas. The galaxy shown here is sharper than the ancient galaxies discussed in this article because it is closer, at only 27 million light-years away.

Webb continues to shake up our understanding of the early universe vis-a-vis galactic evolution, an achievement made possible by the telescope’s unique perspective. Webb will be able to see through large clouds of gas that don’t obscure the faintest and most distant light, allowing researchers to visualize objects from the early universe. For the past two years, Webb has described galaxies which was formed only a few hundred million years ago after the Big Bang and raises new questions about how these structures have unfolded in deep time.