With the new telescope, researchers have been able to measure the distance to one of the most distant galaxies so far observed.
the Distance to a kæmpegalakse, which consists of large amounts of stars, gas and star dust, has been measured by an international team of researchers.
the Galaxy is from the university’s early stage and is 13 billion light-years away.
It makes the galaxy one of the most distant, as scientists have ever been able to measure.
It writes the University of Copenhagen in a press release. The results have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.
the Researchers figured out that the galaxy probably contains a hundred times more stars than the Milky way, the galaxy that our solar system is located in.
And the galaxy is a very special fund, believes Sune Toft, who professor at the Niels Bohr Institute and has helped to discover the galaxy.
– We have discovered a very large, massive galaxy at a very early stage in the universe’s stories.
– It is incredibly close to the Big Bang. And it brings us a step further to understand where everything that we see in the universe today comes from, he says.
A galaxy consists of a lot of stars bound together by gravity. But this galaxy also contains gas and stardust.
This galaxy was already discovered ten years ago, where it got the name “Mambo-9”. But at that time it was not possible to measure the galaxy’s distance from earth, because that was not the right technology.
So it was just one of many galaxies, astronomers could observe, says Sune Toft.
– Normally when we take pictures of distant galaxies with the telescopes, we’re looking at the light from the stars, but at these early and extremely dusty galaxies, it is not possible.
But with the new telescope “Alma”, it has to be possible to measure the distance to the dusty kæmpegalakse.
the Starlight on the here galaxy can not escape because of all the dust, but because the Alma telescope can see the radiation from the dust, it is possible to afstandsbedømme, says Sune Toft.
the Alma telescope consists of 66 telescopes, that is set high in the mountains of Chile.
They linked together and picks up the heat that comes from the shells of galaxies – but not the starlight as ordinary telescopes.
When researchers take pictures of distant galaxies, the photos show how the galaxies looked billions of years ago. The galaxies are so far away that it takes light billions of years to reach the telescope.
The international cooperation with the use of the Alma technology is the largest existing ground-based astronomy project in existence.
/ritzau/
