Something stole this galaxy's spin 12 billion years ago

JWST just found a galaxy that should be spinning, but it isn't. And nobody really knows why.... Almost every galaxy in the Universe is spinning, and once a galaxy gets its spin, it keeps it. Unless something dramatic and violent takes the spin away. Like a collision of two galaxies, when they merge together. All the stars and gas get scrambled up, and sloshed about stripping away some of that nice ordered rotation. And we think that over billions of years of repeated galaxy collisions, with each merger stripping away a little more of that rotation, you can get to what we call a slow rotator. A galaxy that has finally lost most of its spin. But a brand new paper using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, that was just published by Forrest et al., has discovered one of these slow rotator galaxies existing when the Universe was less than 2 billion years old. That goes against all our best models for how galaxies evolve over time; there shouldn’t have been enough time to strip the spin away from that galaxy yet. In this video, we dig into what Forrest et al. found, and the best explanations we have for how this slow rotator came to be. Papers: Forrest et al. (2026) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10987 Smethurst et al (2025) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21869 Forrest el al. (2020) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.07281 Smethurst et al (2018) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.09175 Ferreira et al. (2022) - https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09428 Wu et al. (2023) - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aca652/pdf Kuhn et al. (2024) - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad43eb/pdf Jain et al. (2025) - https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2025/11/aa51689-24.pdf Xiao et al. (2025) - https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2025/04/aa53487-24.pdf Previous videos: JWST finds SMOOTH DISC galaxies EARLIER in the Universe than we thought - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INhHgflGwaE 00:00 - Introduction 02:01 - I - Why galaxies have spin and how they lose it 06:53 - II - What Forest et al. found using JWST 15:20 - III - the best ideas we have to explain what’s going on 18:38 - Bloopers Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: [email protected] Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com