Starship Asterisk*

Astronomers image one of the first massive galaxies to form, 12.8 billion years ago

Astronomers using the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT), which is operated jointly by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica, report today in Nature Astronomy that they have detected the second most distant dusty, star-forming galaxy ever found in the universe – born in the first one billion years after the Big Bang.

It is the oldest object ever detected by the LMT, says astrophysicist Min Yun at UMass Amherst, and at present there is only one other, slightly older and more distant object like this known.

“The Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago, and now we are seeing this galaxy from 12.8 billion years ago, so it was forming within the first billion years after the Big Bang,” he points out. “Seeing an object within the first billion years is remarkable because the universe was fully ionized, that is, it was too hot and too uniform to form anything for the first 400 million years. So our best guess is that the first stars and galaxies and black holes all formed within the first half a billion to one billion years. This new object is very close to being one of the first galaxies ever to form.” ...

• Nature Astronomy (online 06 Nov 2017) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-017-0297-8

• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1707.09022 > 27 Jul 2017

The new object was first detected by astronomers using the Herschel space telescope, but for such distant objects, that instrument can take only “very blurry pictures that yielded almost no information,” Yun notes. So Herschel astronomers passed their information on to LMT director David Hughes, knowing that the new instrument in Mexico is the best in the world to confirm it. Hughes’ graduate student at the time,
Jorge Zavala, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas, is first author of the new paper.

The LMT, located on the summit of a 15,000-foot extinct volcano in Mexico’s central state of Puebla, began collecting its first light in 2011 as a 32-meter millimeter-wavelength radio telescope. It has since been built out to its full 50-meter (164-foot) diameter and when fully operational this winter it will be the largest, most sensitive single-aperture instrument of its kind in the world. It is expected to be at the forefront of new discoveries about the oldest, most distant objects in the universe.

BDanielMayfield wrote:Viva Mexican and Texan Astronomy!

BDanielMayfield wrote:
Viva Mexican and Texan Astronomy!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Negra wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Sierra Negra and Pico de Orizaba (viewed from the south)[/color][/b]

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<<Sierra Negra is an extinct volcano located in the Mexican state of Puebla, close to the border with Veracruz. At officially 4,580 metres above sea level, it is the fifth-highest peak in Mexico. However, because it is overshadowed by nearby Pico de Orizaba (5,610 m), it is not too well known and often left out of lists of Mexico's mountains.

Sierra Negra's summit is the site for one of the world's premier astronomical instruments, the Large Millimeter Telescope. Therefore, the access to the mountain is restricted and has to be applied for at least a week in advance. The service road for this facility is claimed to be the highest road in North America. A part of the telescope facility is visible as a white dot in the picture. >>