Typically, these starburst galaxies that were in existence in the earliest days of our universe are hard to observe since they contain large volumes of obscuring dust.
Advertisement
Now, finally, with the help of their new Atacama Large Millimeter/sub millimeter Array telescope, or as the researchers very romantically named it, ALMA, scientists were finally able to confirm the way they had suspected for decades that galaxies were being formed. The SSA22 one can be termed Proto-Great Wall. The young galaxies seem to reside at the junction of very big filaments in a web of dark matter. The findings shed new light on the formation of these large star systems and how they evolve into giant elliptical systems. But modern universe is without giant galaxies.
This finding appears to agree with the idea that the universe’s most massive galaxies were formed within massive accumulations of dark matter. In the modern Universe, there aren’t any monstrous galaxies left, but some astronomers believe that these monstrous structures have matured into giant elliptical galaxies. The finding of these monstrous galaxies is enabling researchers to have a better understanding of dark matter and how it relates to the evolution of monstrous galaxies.
Kathy Fey is a freelance writer with a creative writing degree from Mount Holyoke College. But up until now, observing these galaxies has been a problem.
By precisely measuring the distance of 9 massive galaxies in a small patch of sky called “SSA22” in the constellation Aquarius (the Water-Bearer), astronomers were able to compare their locations with observations made by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s (NAOJ) Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment (ASTE) and in visible light by the NAOJ’s Subaru Telescope. ALMA, however, detected a gravitational disturbance that scientists believe is the result of the galaxies being located within a tight knot of dark matter.
Current galaxy formation theories predict that these monstrous galaxies form in special environments where dark matter is concentrated. And since modern large elliptical galaxies are simply monstrous galaxies which have mellowed with age, they too must have originated at nexuses in the large scale structure. Moving forward, the team says they will search for more monstrous galaxies “to look back even farther into the early history” of the Universe, and to see how these observable structures have evolved with dark matter.
Advertisement
The team then compared the positions of the baby galaxies with the location of the clusters of young galaxies 11.5 billion lightyears away in the SSA22 which had been observed in visible light by the Subaru Telescope (in Hawaii). The cluster sits right on an intersection of of the dark matter filaments – an area where the invisible matter is particularly dense.
