New Discoveries

From Daily Galaxy:

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have discovered starburst galaxies earlier in the Universe’s history than they were previously thought to have existed. These newly discovered galaxies represent what today’s most massive galaxies looked like in their energetic, star-forming youth. The research is the most recent example of the discoveries coming from the new international ALMA observatory, which celebrates its inauguration today.

The galaxies found in this study have relatives in the local Universe, but the intensity of star formation in these distant objects is unlike anything seen nearby. “Our most extreme galactic neighbors are not forming stars nearly as energetically as the galaxies we observed with ALMA,” said said Joaquin Vieira a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who led the team and is lead author of the Nature paper.”These are monstrous bursts of star formation.” The new results indicate these galaxies are forming 1,000 stars per year, compared to just 1 per year for our Milky Way galaxy.* The most intense bursts of star birth are thought to have occurred in the early Universe in massive, bright galaxies. These starburst galaxies converted vast reservoirs of gas and dust into new stars at a furious pace – many thousands of times faster than stately spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way.

The LABOCA camera on the ESO-operated 12-meter Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope reveals distant starburst galaxies undergoing the most intense type of star formation activity known. … This unprecedented measurement was made possible by gravitational lensing, in which the light from a distant galaxy is distorted and magnified by the gravitational force of a nearer foreground galaxy.