By Ron Cowen
Thanks to some gravitational sleight of hand, astronomers have obtained their sharpest view yet of individual star-making factories in a distant galaxy, 10 billion light-years from Earth. The study reveals that the concentration of new stars in these giant clouds of gas and dust is 100 times higher than that of similar regions in the Milky Way today.
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Mark Swinbank of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University in England and his colleagues were able to home in on star birth regions only 300 light-years across because of a chance alignment with a massive cluster of nearer galaxies that lies along the same line of sight but much closer to Earth. Because heavy objects bend light, the massive foreground cluster acts like a telephoto lens, enlarging the more distant galaxy 16-fold. Swinbank and his collaborators report their findings in a Nature article posted online March 21.
The astronomers discovered the galaxy, SMMJ2135-0102, using the submillimeter-wavelength Atacama Pathfinder Experiment Telescope in northern Chile. Follow-up observations with the Submillimeter Array on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea produced the sharp images that revealed four star-forming blobs in the galaxy. The smallest blob is about 300 light-years across, and most of the patches are about three times bigger than those in the galaxy Arp 220, a rare example of intense star formation in the universe today.