Data obtained using the European Southern Observatory's Alma telescope
in Chile has given astronomers their first glimpse at the interior of
distant galaxies, the ESO said.
Observations from the Atacama Large
Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma) allowed astronomers to start to
see how the first galaxies arose and how they cleared the cosmic fog
during the era of reionization, according to an article in the Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"This is the most
distant detection ever of this kind of emission from a 'normal' galaxy,
seen less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang," study co-author
Andrea Ferrara said.
"For the first time, we are seeing early galaxies not merely as tiny blobs, but as objects with internal structure."
A
team of astronomers led by Cambridge University's Roberto Maiolino
trained the Alma array on galaxies that were known to be seen only about
800 million years after the Big Bang, the explosion that scientists
believe gave birth to the universe.
The astronomers were not
looking for the light from stars, but instead for the faint glow of
ionized carbon coming from the clouds of gas from which the stars were
forming.
"They concentrated on rather less dramatic, but much more
common, galaxies that reionized the Universe and went on to turn into
the bulk of the galaxies that we see around us now," the ESO said.
The telescope was able to detect a faint but clear carbon signal of intense brightness in a galaxy designated as BDF2399.
Alma is an international partnership of the ESO, the US, Japan, Canada, Taiwan and South Korea, in cooperation with Chile.
Alma, the largest astronomical project in existence, sits on the Chajnantor plateau, 5,000 metres above sea level.
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