Astronomers can look deep into the universe's history to witness some of the oldest stars and galaxies known to exist, but no one has ever witnessed early universe galactic formation until now.
Published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of scientists detailed an image of formation gas clouds put together with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope.
"This is the most distant detection ever of this kind of emission from a 'normal' galaxy, seen less than one billion years after the Big Bang," study co-author Andrea Ferrara, of Pisa University's Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy, said in a press release. "It gives us the opportunity to watch the build-up of the first galaxies. For the first time we are seeing early galaxies not merely as tiny blobs, but as objects with internal structure!"
The galaxy, BDF 3299, apparently formed 800 million years after the Big Bang, Space.com reported. The astronomers were able to identify ionized carbon clouds in the image, tipping them off to the galaxy being in its formation stage.
"We have been trying to understand the interstellar medium and the formation of the reionization sources for many years. Finally to be able to test predictions and hypotheses on real data from ALMA is an exciting moment and opens up a new set of questions," Ferrara said. "This type of observation will clarify many of the thorny problems we have with the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the Universe."
