LONDON: Astronomers have imaged in unprecedented detail a distant galaxy near the edge of the universe and found that it is forming stars hundreds to thousands of times faster than the Milky Way.
The astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to image the monstrous galaxy SDP.81, located 11.7 billion light-years away from the Earth in the constellation Hydra.
A gravitational lens created by a massive foreground galaxy 3.4 billion light-years from the Earth acts as a natural telescope, magnifying the image of SDP.81.
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The image becomes brighter but smears into a ring shape, researchers said.
Yoichi Tamura and Masamune Oguri, assistant professors at the University of Tokyo, together with researchers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), have constructed the best model to date for the gravitational lens.
Using this model, they corrected for lensing effects and found that SDP.81 is a monstrous galaxy forming stars at hundreds to thousands of times the rate seen in the Milky Way.
