Flat as a pancake: This is a spiral galaxy some 25 million light-years away. We see it side-on as a thin, glittering streak across the sky, with all its contents neatly aligned in the same plane. This galaxy is the shape it is because it began life as a huge ball of slowly rotating gas. As it collapsed in on itself, it started to spin faster and faster until, like pizza dough spinning and stretching in the air, the disc pictured here started to form