Bright dusty galaxies are hiding secret companions
Source: Phys.org
Bright dusty galaxies are hiding secret companions
May 6, 2016
A new University of Sussex study has cleared the air on what lies behind hot dust visible in the distant universe.
Researchers found that the glow of heated dust reaching our planet is frequently due to three or four galaxies instead of a single one, as scientists had previously assumed.
The study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, applied a statistical method to data from the Herschel Space Observatory to solve one of astrophysics' great conundrums.
Dr Jillian Scudder, lead author and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Astrophysics, said: "This is a really interesting result because when we assumed that one galaxy had to be responsible for all of the dust emission, it implied that the galaxy must be forming a tremendous number of new stars.
"Forming that number of stars in a galaxy so early in the Universe is quite hard to explain. By finding that each galaxy is actually two or three galaxies, we've dropped the number of stars these galaxies have to be producing by a third."
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Read more: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-bright-dusty-galaxies-secret-companions.html
