Astronomers observe early stages of Milky Way-like galaxies in distant universe
Thursday, March 23, 2017 - 13:01
in Astronomy & Space
For decades, astronomers have found distant galaxies by detecting the characteristic way their gas absorbs light from a bright quasar in the background. But efforts to observe the light emitted by these same galaxies have mostly been unsuccessful. Now, a team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile has observed emissions from two distant galaxies initially detected by their quasar absorption signatures, and the results were not what they had expected.