(Press-News.org) Astronomers using a world-wide collection of telescopes have discovered the most prolific star factory in the Universe, surprisingly in a galaxy so distant that they see as it was when the Universe was only six percent of its current age.
The galaxy, dubbed HFLS3, 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is producing the equivalent of nearly 3,000 Suns per year, a rate more than 2,000 times that of our own Milky Way. The galaxy is massive, with a huge reservoir of gas from which to form new stars.
"This is the most detailed look into the physical properties of such a distant galaxy ever made," said Dominik Riechers, of Cornell University. "Getting detailed information on galaxies like this is vitally important to understanding how galaxies, as well as groups and clusters of galaxies, formed in the early Universe," he added.
To accurately determine the galaxy's distance and characteristics required observations with 12 international telescope facilities, including both orbiting and ground-based telescopes. The telescopes ranged from visible-light telescopes, to instruments working at infrared, millimeter-wave, and radio wavelengths. The National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) provided information about cold molecular gas from which new stars are being formed and the radio waves emitted by the remnants of deceased, short-lived, very massive stars.
The scientists found that the galaxy has a mass of stars nearly 40 billion times the mass of the Sun, and gas and dust totalling more than 100 billion times the mass of the Sun, all surrounded by enough mysterious dark matter to eventually build an entire cluster of galaxies.
"This galaxy is proof that very intense bursts of star formation existed only 880 million years after the Big Bang," Riechers said. "We've gotten a valuable look at a very important epoch in the development of the first galaxies," he added. The Universe currently is about 13.7 billion years old.
"Key information about the massive amount of gas in this galaxy came from the VLA observations of radio emission from Carbon Monoxide," said Chris Carilli, Chief Scientist of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, who was not part of the research team. "The techniques used by this team, along with improved technical capabilities available now and coming in the future, will allow the study of more such galaxies, and provide a much better understanding of how the first galaxies formed during the Universe's youth," Carilli added.
"We anticipate learning more about such galaxies using both the VLA and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)," Riechers said. "The VLA can give us information about the cold gas and radio emission in these galaxies, while ALMA can tell us about the warmer gas and dust," he added.
In addition to the VLA, the astronomers used the Herschel Space Observatory, the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy, the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, the Plateau de Bure Interferometer, the Submillimeter Array, the IRAM 30-meter Telescope, the William Herschel Telescope and Gran Telescopio Canarias, the Keck Observatory, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. The large research team included astronomers from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. The scientists reported their findings in the journal Nature.
INFORMATION:
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
END
DALLAS – April 17, 2013 – Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified a specific gene that regulates the heart's ability to regenerate after injuries.
The function of the gene, called Meis1, in the heart was not known previously. The findings of the UTSW investigation are available online in Nature.
"We found that the activity of the Meis1 gene increases significantly in heart cells soon after birth, right around the time heart muscle cells stop dividing. Based on this observation we asked a simple question: If the Meis1 gene is deleted from the heart, ...
Patient satisfaction is an important indicator of a hospital's service quality, but new Johns Hopkins research suggests that it doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the surgical care patients receive.
"We found that the quality of what goes on in the operating room doesn't closely correlate with the patient's perception of the quality of his or her medical care," says Martin A. Makary, M.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and leader of the study described online in JAMA Surgery. "It is important for ...
HIV-infected women in sub-Saharan Africa who fed their babies exclusively with breast milk for more than the first four months of life had the lowest risk of transmitting the virus to their babies through breast milk, according to researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Women who stopped breast feeding earlier than four months had the highest concentrations of HIV in their breast milk, and those who continued to breastfeed, but not exclusively, had concentration levels in-between the two practices. The findings are online in the journal Science ...
To maneuver a car into a parking spot parallel to the road can be quite a challenge. It would be an easy task, of course, if only the vehicle could move sideways. As this is not possible, the sideways motion must be pieced together – sometimes elegantly, sometimes less so – in a series of forward and backward movements and turns on the steering wheel. Such a finely tuned sequence of movements also enables cats to almost always land on their feet after a free fall. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now used a similar principle for steering a quantum system into a desired state. ...
Fame and achievement in performance-related careers may be earned at the cost of a shorter life, according to a study published online today in QJM: An International Journal of Medicine.
Based on the premise that an obituary in the New York Times (NYT) usually implies success in one's career, Professor Richard Epstein and Catherine Epstein analysed 1000 consecutive obituaries published in the NYT during 2009-2011 in terms of gender, age, occupation, and cause of death. They separated subjects into four broad occupational categories: performance/sport (including actors, ...
Monitoring pain and providing analgesics to patients in intensive care units (ICUs) during non-surgical procedures, such as turning and washing, can not only reduce the amount of pain but also reduce the number of serious adverse events including cardiac arrest, finds new research in BioMed Central's open access journal Critical Care.
Although pain at rest is routinely noted, pain during procedures is less regularly reported and its effect on patients unknown. To assess this missing information and to implement techniques to help better control pain where necessary, ...
Equipped with the zebrafish genome, researchers have designed a method to assay the function of each and every gene and to explore the effects genetic variation has on zebrafish. So far the team has generated one or more mutations in almost 40% of all zebrafish genes.
The resource will be a comprehensive catalogue of how changes to our genes can have physical and biochemical consequences, giving other researchers the tools to understand human disease.
Many genes are similar between the human genome and those of less complex animals. As a vertebrate, the zebrafish (Danio ...
Researchers demonstrate today that 70 per cent of protein-coding human genes are related to genes found in the zebrafish and that 84 per cent of genes known to be associated with human disease have a zebrafish counterpart. Their study highlights the importance of zebrafish as a model organism for human disease research.
The team developed a high-quality annotated zebrafish genome sequence to compare with the human reference genome. Only two other large genomes have been sequenced to this high standard: the human genome and the mouse genome. The completed zebrafish genome ...
ABOUT THE DREAM PROJECT
The Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods Project (DREAM Project), founded in 2006 by Andrea Califano (Columbia University) and Gustavo Stolovitzky (IBM), was originally conceived as an initiative to advance thenascent field of network biology through the organization of Challenges on network reconstruction and pathway inference. Since the first set of network inference challenges of 2007 (DREAM2) the concept of using collaborative-competitions as a vehicle to carry on a meaningful dialogue in the computational biology community ...
An historic fish, with an intriguing past, now has had its genome sequenced, providing a wealth of information on the genetic changes that accompanied the adaptation from an aquatic environment to land. A team of international researchers led by Chris Amemiya, PhD, Director of Molecular Genetics at the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason (BRI) and Professor of Biology at the University of Washington, will publish "The African coelacanth genome provides insights into tetrapod evolution" April 18 as the cover article in Nature. The coelacanth genome was sequenced ...
