Gravitational lensing—and a new telescope—reveal ancient starbursts
Ars Technica » Scientific Method 2013-03-14
The galaxies of the Universe's youth worked busily at making stars—that much is certain. However, what did those galaxies look like? How many were there, and how were they distributed in space and time?
Over such huge distances, those galaxies appear faint to us, so it's only within the last decade or so that astronomers have been able to start obtaining a reasonable view of them. The newly inaugurated ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) is one of the most promising telescope arrays in the world for making observations of the early Universe.
As reported in a new Nature paper, ALMA scientists measured the distances to 23 early star-forming galaxies in a patch of sky in the Southern Hemisphere. Out of that sample, at least 10 emitted their light when the Universe was less than 1.5 billion years old, placing them among some of the earliest galaxies observed.
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