He added that their stint helped them become the first scientists to see early galaxies as objects with internal structure, not simply as tiny blobs. The red cloud to the lower left, detected by ALMA, shows a huge cloud of gas going into the galaxy’s formation.
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Astronomers from Europe witnessed star-forming gas clouds indicating the formation of galaxies.
From one of the galaxies, BDF 3299, ALMA could pick up a faint but clear signal from the glowing carbon. Consisting of 66 12-meter (39 ft.), and 7-meter (23 ft.) diameter radio telescopes observing at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, ALMA is expected to provide insight on star birth during the early universe and detailed imaging of local star and planet formation.
According to Maiolino, the team’s observations would not have been possible without ALMA’s “unique sensitivity and spatial resolution”.
During the reionization period of the galaxy, it is believed that the BDF3299 was among the galaxies that first condensed out of cold matter. “It gives us the opportunity to watch the build-up of the first galaxies”, Andrea Ferrara, a cosmologist and co-author of the study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, said in a statement. Astronomers call this the epoch of reionization, but little is known about these first galaxies, and up to now they have just been seen as very faint blobs.
Sometime between 200 million years and 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe entered a phase of “reionization” when neutral material dominating the cosmos started to condense – a process that eventually led to the formation of the galaxies we see today. However, this glow wasn’t coming from the center of the galaxy, but rather from one side.
Additionally, the carbon’s glow is actually tracing new, cold gas on its way into the stars from intergalactic space, and then the light is sent back out on its long journey to the ALMA’s dishes.
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The ALMA telescope in Chile at the European Southern Observatory made the discovery when scientists were exploring deep space past the galaxies in order to spot a faint glow emanating from ionized carbon according to a report by UPI. And the earliest galaxies appeared in the telescope lens as indistinct smears. The combination of ACS and NICMOS images is used to search for galaxies that existed between 400 and 800 million years (corresponding to a redshift range of 7 to 12) after the big bang. This study can finally test predictions from real data from ALMA where it can clarify problems about how first stars are formed in galaxies in the universe, in general.
