VLA/ALMA: First Look at Birthplaces of Most Current Stars

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VLA/ALMA: First Look at Birthplaces of Most Current Stars

Post by bystander » Fri Dec 23, 2016 3:38 pm

VLA and ALMA Team Up to Give First Look at Birthplaces of Most Current Stars
NRAO | ALMA | KIMPU | 2016 Dec 22
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Astronomers have gotten their first look at exactly where most of today's stars were born. To do so, they used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to look at distant galaxies seen as they were some 10 billion years ago.

At that time, the Universe was experiencing its peak rate of star formation. Most stars in the present Universe were born then.

"We knew that galaxies in that era were forming stars prolifically, but we didn't know what those galaxies looked like, because they are shrouded in so much dust that almost no visible light escapes them," said Wiphu Rujopakam, ...

Radio waves, unlike visible light, can get through the dust. However, in order to reveal the details of such distant and faint galaxies, the astronomers had to make the most sensitive images ever made with the VLA.

The new observations, using the VLA and ALMA, have answered longstanding questions about just what mechanisms were responsible for the bulk of star formation in those galaxies. They found that intense star formation in the galaxies they studied most frequently occured throughout the galaxies, as opposed to much smaller regions in present-day galaxies with similar high star-formation rates.

The astronomers used the VLA and ALMA to study galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a small area of sky observed since 2003 with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The HST made very long exposures of the area to detect galaxies in the far-distant Universe, and numerous observing programs with other telescopes have followed up on the HST work. ...

VLA and ALMA Imaging of Intense, Galaxy-Wide Star Formation in z ~ 2 Galaxies - W. Rujopakarn et al
Attachments
Radio/Optical combination images of distant galaxies as seen with <br />NSF's Very Large Array and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Their <br />distances from Earth are indicated in the top set of images. <br />Credit: K. Trisupatsilp, NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA
Radio/Optical combination images of distant galaxies as seen with
NSF's Very Large Array and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Their
distances from Earth are indicated in the top set of images.
Credit: K. Trisupatsilp, NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA
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