14 DAY TRIAL // Understanding how the first galaxies formed in the earliest Universe is one of the main goals of astronomy, as the knowledge could provide researchers with a great many answers on why galaxies behave and interact the way they do today. By using a special camera known as AzTEC, experts from an international initiative managed to picture such formations, located approximately 11.5 billion light-years away. Considering that the Universe as a whole is about 13.7 billion light-years old, it stands to reason that these are some of the first galaxies to emerge. However, their structure is puzzling.
It would appear that the ultra-massive formations existed at a scale never before thought possible for galaxies, and also that they tended to come together, to form a very peculiar, and also very big primordial structure. The optically dim, ultra-massive galactic systems were recorded by pointing the AzTEC instrument towards the Aquarius constellation, which is known since the early 1990s to house very active, yet very old stellar formations known as Lyman alpha emitters.
The extremely-sensitive camera, which will soon be installed on the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), a machine operated by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is able to sense the thermal “glow” breaking through the warm dust surrounding the ancient galaxies. The formations are virtually encased in a cocoon of the stuff, and their presence cannot be detected using conventional optical imaging techniques. When the new LMT instrument, which is currently under construction in Mexico, will be complete, it will have at its disposal the fully functioning AzTEC tool, as well as a 50-meter millimeter-wavelength antenna.
“We call this star formation starbursting because it’s thought to be a rather violent and short-lived phase, about 50 million years, in the galaxy’s life,” Grant Wilson, the expert who led the team that developed the AzTEC, said of the early galaxies. The find “is akin to finding a flock of owls congregating around a group of fireflies at night. We’ve known about the fireflies for several years because they glow and are relatively easy to see. But these recent measurements show there’s a lot more hidden in the darkness. Now the question is, are the fireflies there because of the owls, or are the owls there because of the fireflies?” the expert asked.
PhysOrg quotes Wilson as explaining that the main reason why the massive galaxies were not observed thus far is because they basically appear not to exist, upon first inspecting the portion of the sky that contains them. That is to say, in their prolific star-forming processes, these behemoths of the skies create and surround themselves with so much cosmic dust, that it's virtually impossible for the light of even the brightest star inside them to penetrate it.