Astronomers Get Sharpest View Ever of Star Factories in Distant Universe
Astronomers have combined a natural gravitational lens and a sophisticated telescope array to get the sharpest view ever of "star factories" in a galaxy over 10 billion light-years from Earth. They found that the distant galaxy, known as SMM J2135-0102, is making new stars 250 times faster than our Galaxy, the Milky Way. They also pinpointed four discrete star-forming regions within the galaxy, each over 100 times brighter than locations (like the Orion Nebula) where stars form in our Galaxy. This is the first time that astronomers have been able to study properties of individual star-forming regions within a galaxy so far from Earth. Read more
For the first time, astronomers have made direct measurements of the size and brightness of regions of star-birth in a very distant galaxy, thanks to a chance discovery with the APEX telescope. The galaxy is so distant, and its light has taken so long to reach us, that we see it as it was 10 billion years ago. A cosmic "gravitational lens" is magnifying the galaxy, giving us a close-up view that would otherwise be impossible. This lucky break reveals a hectic and vigorous star-forming life for galaxies in the early Universe, with stellar nurseries forming one hundred times faster than in more recent galaxies. The research is published online today in the journal Nature. Astronomers were observing a massive galaxy cluster with the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope, using submillimetre wavelengths of light, when they found a new and uniquely bright galaxy, more distant than the cluster and the brightest very distant galaxy ever seen at submillimetre wavelengths. It is so bright because the cosmic dust grains in the galaxy are glowing after being heated by starlight. The new galaxy has been given the name SMM J2135-0102.
SMM J21350-0102 is shrouded in dust, which hides it from most telescopes. But the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile, spotted the galaxy via sub-millimetre radio waves emitted by the dust. Light from the galaxy is absorbed by the dust, emitted as infrared and stretched to radio waves as the universe expands. Its brightness and size is boosted by the magnification of a galaxy cluster that lies in front. This allowed a team led by Mark Swinbank of the University of Durham, UK, to resolve individual clouds of star formation. They calculated that the galaxy was churning out 250 suns a year. Read more
Intense Star-Formation within Resolved Compact Regions in a Galaxy at z=2
Scientists have found a massive galaxy in the early Universe creating stars like our Sun up to 100 times faster than the modern-day Milky Way. The team of international researchers, led by Durham University scientist and Royal Astronomical Society Norman Lockyer Fellow Dr Mark Swinbank, described the finding as like seeing "a teenager going through a growth spurt". Due to the amount of time it takes light to reach Earth the scientists observed the galaxy, known as SMM J2135-0102, as it would have appeared 10 billion years ago - just three billion years after the Big Bang. They found four discrete star-forming regions within the galaxy and each one was more than 100 times brighter than star-forming regions in the Milky Way like the Orion Nebula familiar to amateur astronomers. The team say their results, published online today (Sunday, 21st March), in the scientific journal Nature, suggest that star formation was more rapid and vigorous in the early Universe as galaxies went through periods of huge growth.
SMM J2135-0102 was discovered from an sub-mm observation with the APEX Telescope. This galaxy is an actively star-forming galaxy at z=2.3 (seen when the Universe was only three billion years old) which has been gravitationally lensed by a factor 32x by a foreground galaxy cluster. Due to the lensing effect, the apparent brightness makes SMMJ2135-0102 one of the brightest sub-mm galaxies known (with an 850um flux of 106mJy), and therefore an ideal laboratory to study the processes of star-formation in the distant Universe.