* Astronomy

Dusty substructure in a galaxy far far away

A team of scientists, among whom scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) and astronomer John McKean (ASTRON/ University of Groningen), have combined high-resolution images from the ALMA telescopes with a new scheme for undoing the distorting effects of a powerful gravitational lens in order to provide the first detailed picture of a young and distant galaxy, over 11 billion light-years from Earth. The reconstructed images show that star formation is heating interstellar dust and making it glow strongly in three distinct clumps embedded in a broader distribution, suggesting that object may be a rotating disk galaxy seen nearly edge-on.
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