Astronomy Picture of the Day hosts this remarkable image today, which they dub a “21st century” image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101. The Pinwheel Galaxy is notable for its beautifully clear spiral structure and its nearly face-on appearance to us. It lies about 25 million light-years away, in the constellation of Ursa Major. The image above combines images from four of NASA’s modern astronomical observing spacecraft: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Hubble Space Telescope, which provide images in the x-ray (purple), ultraviolet (blue), infrared (red), and visible (yellow/white) wavelengths, respectively.
However if the universe is 12 billion years old the spirals on the pinwheel would have disappeared and the galaxy would be more or less homogenous
eg if we take a pot of custard and stir in some red colourant the spirals with disappear very quickly.