Monstrous
galaxies are thought to preferentially be born at the centers of the
web-like structures of dark matter and are formed by young galaxies.
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array
(ALMA) have discovered a nest of monstrous baby galaxies 11.5 billion
light-years away. These young galaxies seem to reside at the junction of
gigantic filaments in a web of dark matter. These findings are
important for understanding how monstrous galaxies like these form and
how they evolve into huge elliptical galaxies.
A press release on
these results was issued by The University of Tokyo in Japanese. The
English version was translated by the National Astronomical Observatory
of Japan. The full text is available here.
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This
observation result was published as Umehata et al. “ALMA Deep Field in
SSA22: A concentration of dusty starbursts in a z=3.09 protocluster
core” in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, issued on December 4, 2015.
The
Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international
astronomy facility, is a partnership of the European Organisation for
Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), the U.S.
National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural
Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile.
ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in
cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the
National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and by NINS in cooperation with
the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space
Science Institute (KASI).
ALMA construction and operations are
led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc.
(AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical
Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA
Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the
construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.
