Apr 22, 2021

ALMA Discovers Rotating Infant Galaxy with Help of Natural Cosmic Telescope

 

Overview of the press release

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers found a rotating baby galaxy 1/100th the size of the Milky Way at a time when the Universe was only seven percent of its present age. Thanks to assistance by the gravitational lens effect, the team was able to explore for the first time the nature of small and dark "normal galaxies" in the early Universe, representative of the main population of the first galaxies, which greatly advances our understanding of the initial phase of galaxy evolution.
 
“Our study demonstrates, for the first time, that we can directly measure the internal motion of such faint (less massive) galaxies in the early Universe and compare it with the theoretical predictions”, says Kotaro Kohno, a professor at the University of Tokyo and the leader of the ALCS team.
 

Figure: 

Image of the galaxy cluster RXCJ0600-2007 taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, combined with gravitational lensing images of the distant galaxy RXCJ0600-z6, 12.4 billion light-years away, observed by ALMA (shown in red). Due to the gravitational lensing effect by the galaxy cluster, the image of RXCJ0600-z6 was intensified and magnified, and appeared to be divided into three or more parts.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Fujimoto et al., NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope

 

These observation results were presented in Seiji Fujimoto et al. “ALMA Lensing Cluster Survey: Bright [CII] 158 μm Lines from a Multiply Imaged Sub-L* Galaxy at z = 6.0719” in the Astrophysical Journal on April 22, 2021 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/abd7ecs) and Nicolas Laporte et al. “ALMA Lensing Cluster Survey: a strongly lensed multiply imaged dusty system at z > 6” in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on April 22, 2021.

 

Professor Kotaro Kohno  and Assistant Professor Bunyo Hatsukade (Institute of Astronomy, The University of Tokyo), Kana Morokuma (Research fellow, JSPS), Yuki Yoshimura (graduate student), Assistant Professor Masamune Oguri (Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science), Associate Professor Kazuhiro Shimasaku (Department of Astronomy, Graduate School of Science) also contributed to this research.

 

To read the full press release, please visit the website of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

 

Publication details


Journal

The Astrophysical Journal
Title
ALMA Lensing Cluster Survey: Bright [CII] 158μm Lines from a Multiply Imaged Sub-L* Galaxy at z = 6.0719
Authors
Seiji Fujimoto et al.
DOI

https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/abd7ecs

Journal
The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Title
ALMA Lensing Cluster Survey: a strongly lensed multiply imaged dusty system at z > 6
Authors
Nicolas Laporte et al.
DOI

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