An international team of astronomers has managed to portray a collision between two galaxies that took place when the universe was only half its present age through a combination of telescopes located in space and on the ground, as a cosmic lens “infinitely greater.”
As today informed the European Southern Observatory (ESO for its acronym in English), the scientists used this cosmic lens along with various telescopes to reveal details of the H-ATLAS Galaxy J142935. 3-002836 that “would not be visible otherwise,” and get “the best image of a galactic collision.”
The project leader explained that this type of lens, created by huge structures like galaxies and clusters of galaxies bend light objects behind them because of their strong gravity, allowing them to directly compare local galaxies with other “more remote”, seen when the Universe was considerably younger.
The study’s lead author, Hugo Messias, University of Concepción (Chile) and the Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and the University of Lisbon (Portugal) said that the ability of scientists to see the detail improvement “enormously” through these lenses created by the universe against the “limitations” presented by telescopes.
However, Messias recognized that these lenses work, making the lens galaxy and located behind must be aligned very precisely. “These casual alignments are very rare and tend to be difficult to identify,” although recent studies can find those cases “in a much more efficient way.”
The team of astronomers found H-ATLAS Galaxy J142935. 3-002836 during a survey of the H-ATLAS project through an “extensive monitoring campaign with the most powerful telescopes,” managed to show that the object being viewed through the lens was a galactic collision that results each year . hundreds of new stars
In particular, the scientists used three telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO for its acronym in English): ALMA, APEX and VISTA, located in the Atacama Desert (Chile ), space telescopes Hubble, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA for short) and Spitzer, NASA, and terrestrial Gemini South and Keck-II among others.
According to explained from the ESO, this clash between two galaxies resembles collision Antennae Galaxies that “is much closer to” being the youngest and closest to Earth example.
This discovery has possible to compare the Antennae system, forming stars at a rate of only a few tens of the mass of our Sun every year, with the H-ATLAS system J142935.3-002836 that at the same time, becomes a mass gas more than 400 times the Sun’s mass into new stars.
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