NRAO: Titanic Galaxies Captured in Extreme Starbursting Merger

[bystander]

Duo of Titanic Galaxies Captured in Extreme Starbursting Merger
ALMA | NRAO | ESO | NAOJ | 2017 Nov 13

Pair of Exceptionally Rare Hyper-luminous Galaxies Discovered with ALMA

[img3="Composite image of ADFS-27 galaxy pair. The background image is from ESA's Herschel Space Observatory. The object was then detected by ESO's Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) telescope (middle image). ALMA (right) was able to identify two galaxies: ADFS-27N (for North) and ADFS-27S (for South). The starbursting galaxies are about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth and destined to merge into a single, massive galaxy. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, B. Saxton; ESA Herschel; ESO APEX; ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); D. Riechers"]http://www.almaobservatory.org/wp-conte ... 71113a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]

New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have uncovered the never-before-seen close encounter between two astoundingly bright and spectacularly massive galaxies in the early universe. These so-called hyper-luminous starburst galaxies are exceedingly rare at this epoch of cosmic history -- near the time when galaxies first formed -- and may represent one of the most-extreme examples of violent star formation ever observed.

Astronomers captured these two interacting galaxies, collectively known as ADFS-27, as they began the gradual process of merging into a single, massive elliptical galaxy. An earlier sideswiping encounter between the two helped to trigger their astounding bursts of star formation. Astronomers speculate that this merger may eventually form the core of an entire galaxy cluster. Galaxy clusters are among the most massive structures in the universe. ...

The ADFS-27 galaxy pair is located approximately 12.7 billion light-years from Earth in the direction of the Dorado constellation. At this distance, astronomers are viewing this system as it appeared when the universe was only about one billion years old. ...

Astronomers See Clash of "Titan" Galaxies ... 13 Billion Years Ago
Cornell University | 2017 Nov 13

Rise of the Titans: A Dusty, Hyper-Luminous "870 micron Riser" Galaxy at z~6 - Dominik A. Riechers et al

• Astrophysical Journal 850(1):1 (20 Nov 2017) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aa8ccf
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1705.09660 > 26 May 2017 (v1), 12 Sep 2017 (v2)

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Herschel Discovers Galaxy Merger in the Very Early Universe
ESA | Space Science | Herschel | 2017 Nov 13

What seemed at first like a rare instance of a huge, ancient galaxy revealed itself to be an even rarer pair of extremely massive galaxies, seen on the brink of merging when the Universe was only a billion years old.

This outstanding source was first identified by ESA’s Herschel space observatory, and later exposed in greater detail with the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. ...