Scientists using a gigantic radio telescope have captured the best view yet of two faraway galaxies colliding in deep space. The Chile-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and other telescopes employed a sort of cosmic magnifying glass to study a galaxy called H1429-0028, which lies about 6.9 billion light-years from Earth. This phenomenon, known as gravitational lensing, occurs when a huge object in space such as a galaxy bends light coming from other bodies behind it. Lensing allows astronomers to peer at galaxies or other objects that would otherwise be too dim and distant to view. In far-infrared light, H1429-0028 is one of the brightest gravitationally lensed objects available. It was first found in the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey, and is hard to see in visible light. A suite of telescopes examined the galaxy, including ALMA, NASAs Hubble Space Telescope, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Karl Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. Hubble and Keck saw a ring of light around the foreground galaxy and also spotted large dust clouds within it, which made it tough to study the more distant H1429-0028. VLA and ALMA, however, are designed to peer through dust clouds. Their vision at longer wavelengths provided a clearer view of the background H1429-0028, revealing it to be two merging galaxies rather than a single object. Source: bit.do/14263-SpaceTelescopes
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 13:45:33 +0000
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