Astronomers see giant galaxy being bornThe Spiderweb Galaxy – which spans some 3 times the diameter of our Milky Way – is forming inside a cluster of protogalaxies, in a dense soup of molecular gas.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NROA) announced late last week (December 1, 2016) that astronomers used radio telescopes to scrutinize a giant galaxy forming at the center of a cluster of protogalaxies in the early universe. Their observations show the giant galaxy appears to be forming within what they say is a “surprisingly dense soup” of molecular gas. This is the Spiderweb Galaxy, not yet a single galaxy, but still a clustering of protogalaxies, or galaxies emerging from their cloud of cold gas. Astronomers see this cluster not as it appears today, but as it was more than 10 billion years ago, when the universe was approximately 3 billion years old. The astronomers reported their findings in the December 2, 2016 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Science. Bjorn Emonts of the Center for Astrobiology in Spain led the international research team. He said in a statement:
And that’s just what you might expect in the very young universe, when some of the earliest stars and galaxies were just beginning to form. The astronomers used the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to detect carbon monoxide gas. They explained:
The astronomers said that the ATCA observations revealed the total extent of the gas, and the VLA observations, much more narrowly focused, provided another surprise. Most of the cold gas was found, not within the protogalaxies, but instead between them. Astronomer Preshanth Jagannathan of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico said:
Earlier observations of the Spiderweb, made at ultraviolet wavelengths, have indicated that rapid star formation is ongoing across most of the region occupied by the gas. Jagannathan said:
Bottom line: Radio astronomers studying the Spiderweb Galaxy – a giant galaxy forming inside a cluster of protogalaxies – saw that it is forming inside a “surprisingly dense soup” of molecular gas.
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