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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAstronomers find 11.6-billion-year-old star nursery in ancient galaxy
http://news.sciencemag.org/space/2015/06/astronomers-find-11-6-billion-year-old-star-nursery-ancient-galaxyBy Daniel Clery 8 June 2015 2:30 pm
Some galaxies are so distant that they appear only as featureless points of light to observers on Earth. But thanks to another closer galaxy acting as a magnifying lens, astronomers have been able to see star-forming regions in one such distant galaxyknown as SDP.81dating to 2.4 billion years after the big bang. This is the most detailed image obtained of a galaxy that far back in the universes history. Directly in line between SDP.81 and Earth is another galaxy, the gravity of which bent the light from SDP.81 in a way similar to how a lens magnifies objects. Viewed from Earth, the magnified galaxy appears as a circle, known as an Einstein ring. But using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) recorded late last year, seven groups of astronomers have reconstructed a true image of SDP.81, which, although hazy, looks much more like a galaxy. Their work was helped by ALMAs exceptional resolution. The array is made up of 66 radio telescope dishes high on a plateau in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. ALMA combines signals from all the dishes to see much finer details, and for these observations the movable dishes were spaced out to their maximum extentsome 15 kilometersto achieve a resolution six times better than the Hubble Space Telescope can see in infrared light. In eight papers posted online on the arXiv preprint server, the astronomers describe how they were able to estimate SDP.81s mass, measure its rotation, and see clumps of gas collapsing inwards. Most notably, they could see large dusty clouds thought to contain cold molecular gas, just the sort of place where stars and planets are bornakin to the Orion Nebula in our Milky Way galaxy.
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Astronomers find 11.6-billion-year-old star nursery in ancient galaxy (Original Post)
G_j
Jun 2015
OP
dembotoz
(16,806 posts)1. Wow older than 6000 years
randome
(34,845 posts)2. In the original Superman comics, Krypton viewed other worlds through 'super-telescopes'.
We're just about there ourselves. It's amazing how much science has advanced simply on the topic of how to collect light.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it."
Tony Randall, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)[/center][/font][hr]
closeupready
(29,503 posts)3. The distances involved in the universe utterly astound me.
Always have. Kind of scary too. K&R