Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 2019 Oct 14
New lens technique spots tiny dwarf galaxy in the first, super-energetic stages of star formation.
Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have used a massive cluster of galaxies as an X-ray magnifying glass to peer back in time, to nearly 9.4 billion years ago. In the process, they spotted a tiny dwarf galaxy in its very first, high-energy stages of star formation.
While galaxy clusters have been used to magnify objects at optical wavelengths, this is the first time scientists have leveraged these massive gravitational giants to zoom in on extreme, distant, X-ray-emitting phenomena.
What they detected appears to be a blue speck of an infant galaxy, about 1/10,000 the size of our Milky Way, in the midst of churning out its first stars — supermassive, cosmically short-lived objects that emit high-energy X-rays, which the researchers detected in the form of a bright blue arc. ...
Bayliss says the detection of this single, distant galaxy is proof that scientists can use galaxy clusters as natural X-ray magnifiers, to pick out extreme, highly energetic phenomena in the universe’s early history. ...
An X-ray Detection of Star Formation in a Highly Magnified Giant Arc ~ M. B. Bayliss et al
- Nature Astronomy (online 14 Oct 2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-0888-7
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1910.05343 > 11 Oct 2019