Niels Bohr Institute | University of Copenhagen | 11 Oct 2010
Tracing the molecular gas in distant submillimetre galaxies via CO(1-0) imaging with the EVLA - RJ Ivison et alScientists from the Niels Bohr Institute have been studying distant galaxies, which are among the most active star-forming galaxies in the Universe. They form around 1,000 new stars a year – a 1,000 times more than our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The findings have been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"The galaxies are located in the far distant universe – when the Universe was 3 billion years old (equivalent to only 20 percent of its current age). It is a period of the Universe when the galaxies were very active, almost teenager-like and out of control", describes Thomas R. Greve, Associate professor in astrophysics at the Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Together with researchers from the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh and Durham University in England, he has studied the distant galaxies using the Expanded Very Large Array, which is an astronomical observatory in New Mexico, USA. The observatory consists of 27 parabolic antennas, each of which have a diameter of 25 meters and can measure radio waves from distant objects. Data from each antenna is combined electronically so that the final measurements have an angular resolution equivalent to a single antenna with a diameter of 36 km and a sensitivity equal to that of a single antenna with a diameter of 130 meters.
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1009.0749 > 03 Sep 2010 (v1), 09 Sep 2010 (v2) > submitted to MNRAS