Distant star baby boom captured by huge new telescope
Distant star baby boom captured by huge new telescope
Montreal researcher helped unscramble images
By Emily Chung, CBC News
Posted: Mar 15, 2013 3:27 PM ET
Last Updated: Mar 16, 2013 9:47 PM ET
Astronomers are watching galaxies pop out bundles of newborn stars 12 billion light years away, thanks to a huge, sensitive new telescope in the Chilean Andes.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope, built by an international collaboration that included Canada's National Research Council, was officially inaugurated just this week.
But it has already allowed scientists to observe in unprecedented detail galaxies in the very distant universe — 12 billion years back in time — when our universe, now estimated to be 13.7 billion years old, was less than 2 billion years old. (The light has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth, and therefore shows us what was happening at the source 12 billion years ago). The data collected by ALMA, an array of dozens of gigantic satellite dishes, also made it possible to calculate just how far away those galaxies are.
The observations, some of which were published this week in Nature and others that will be described in two upcoming articles in the Astrophysical Journal, show that just one billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was already home to many distant, star-forming galaxies called starburst galaxies.
More:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/03/15/science-starburst-galaxies-alma-hezaveh.html
