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The three-dimensional structure of all cloud complexes in the solar neighbourhood is revealed, showing a narrow and coherent 2.7-kpc arrangement of dense gas, in disagreement with the Gould Belt model.

For the past 150 years, the prevailing view of the local interstellar medium has been based on a peculiarity known as the Gould Belt(1-4), an expanding ring of young stars, gas and dust, tilted about 20 degrees to the Galactic plane. However, the physical relationship between local gas clouds has remained unknown because the accuracy in distance measurements to such clouds is of the same order as, or larger than, their sizes(5-7). With the advent of large photometric surveys(8) and the astrometric survey(9), this situation has changed(10). Here we reveal the three-dimensional structure of all local cloud complexes. We find a narrow and coherent 2.7-kiloparsec arrangement of dense gas in the solar neighbourhood that contains many of the clouds thought to be associated with the Gould Belt. This finding is inconsistent with the notion that these clouds are part of a ring, bringing the Gould Belt model into question. The structure comprises the majority of nearby star-forming regions, has an aspect ratio of about 1:20 and contains about three million solar masses of gas. Remarkably, this structure appears to be undulating, and its three-dimensional shape is well described by a damped sinusoidal wave on the plane of the Milky Way with an average period of about 2 kiloparsecs and a maximum amplitude of about 160 parsecs.

Massive disk galaxies like the Milky Way are expected to form at late times in traditional models of galaxy formation(1,2), but recent numerical simulations suggest that such galaxies could form as early as a billion years after the Big Bang through the accretion of cold material and mergers(3,4). Observationally, it has been difficult to identify disk galaxies in emission at high redshift(5,6) in order to discern between competing models of galaxy formation. Here we report imaging, with a resolution of about 1.3 kiloparsecs, of the 158-micrometre emission line from singly ionized carbon, the far-infrared dust continuum and the near-ultraviolet continuum emission from a galaxy at a redshift of 4.2603, identified by detecting its absorption of quasar light. These observations show that the emission arises from gas inside a cold, dusty, rotating disk with a rotational velocity of about 272 kilometres per second. The detection of emission from carbon monoxide in the galaxy yields a molecular mass that is consistent with the estimate from the ionized carbon emission of about 72 billion solar masses. The existence of such a massive, rotationally supported, cold disk galaxy when the Universe was only 1.5 billion years old favours formation through either cold-mode accretion or mergers, although its large rotational velocity and large content of cold gas remain challenging to reproduce with most numerical simulations(7,8).

A massive rotating disk galaxy was formed a mere 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, a surprisingly short time after the origin of the Universe.