 When the universe was just 3 billion years old, half of the most massive galaxies were extremely compact and had already exhausted their fuel for star formation. The galaxy is said to be dead when it stops creating new stars. They were elliptical, and it is believed that they grew into the most massive local elliptical galaxies we see today through mergers with nearby galaxies. In 2017, while scanning a distant galaxy cluster, astronomers discovered the first example of a massive compact dead galaxy in the early universe that is not elliptical. The foreground galaxy cluster has magnified the image to the more distant galaxy, enabling a closer look than ever before. The dead galaxy is in fact a fast spinning disc-shaped galaxy. It has three times the mass of the Milky Way, but it's only half the size and spinning at more than twice the speed. This is the first direct observational evidence that at least some of the earliest dead galaxies somehow evolved from a Milky Way-shaped disc into the giant elliptical galaxies we see today. How this could happen is not yet understood.