HONG KONG: Astronomers have for the first time directly detected dust in a galaxy in the early universe. The galaxy A1689-zD1 shines at us from only 700 million years after the Big Bang, giving the galaxy a redshift of 7.5. Surprisingly, compared with the galaxy’s gas, the amount of dust A1689-zD1 contains makes it look like a far more “mature” star-forming galaxy, such as the Milky Way.
Darach Watson (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and colleagues took advantage of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to explore A1689-zD1, which had previously turned up in images by the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. ALMA’s capabilities, combined with optical observations from the Very Large Telescope (VLT), enabled them to wheedle out the galaxy’s properties, the team reports March 2nd in Nature.
The galaxy is only bright enough to study because its light is lensed by a galaxy cluster lying between it and us. The gravity of the cluster, Abell 1689, bends and magnifies A1689-zD1’s light as the light passes the cluster on its way to us. As a result, A1689-zD1 is magnified by more than a factor of nine.
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