A striking new image from the new Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope displays over 100 ancient galaxies with a high density of star formation, with greater visibility than ever before achieved.
The pictures are some of the first to come from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a new set of powerful telescopes set atop a plateau in the desert of Chile. They were released by the European Southern Observatory.
Scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array to focus on an area of sky in the southern constellation Fornax, "The Furnace." Using data from ALMA, the scientists were able to boost the resolution of images taken by another ESO telescope, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX). The results were astounding.
"Astronomers have waited for data like this for over a decade," scientist Jacqueline Hodge of the Max-Planck Institute in Germany said in a statement. "ALMA is so powerful that it has revolutionized the way that we can observe these galaxies, even though the telescope was not fully completed at the time of the observations."
The scientists used APEX to look for fertile regions of distant galaxies. These are regions where stars are being formed. However, they were unsatisfied with the clarity of the images taken. Of the 126 galaxies detected by APEX, the locations of all of them remained somewhat obscure. So the scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array to examine the galaxies for two minutes each. As a result, star-forming galaxies were detected within an area 200 times smaller than that indicated by APEX.
"We previously thought the brightest of these galaxies were forming stars a thousand times more vigorously than our own galaxy, the Milky Way, putting them at risk of blowing themselves apart," participant Alexander Karim of Durham University in the United Kingdom said in a statement. "The ALMA images revealed multiple, smaller galaxies forming stars at somewhat more reasonable rates."
Costing $1.3 billion and taking 10 years to build, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array can see deeper and farther in certain light wavelengths than any radio telescope ever constructed.
