Astronomers Discover Concentrated Cluster Of Galaxies Embedded In Dark Matter

Typically, observing these stardust galaxies that existed in the early days of the universe is quite tough since large volume of obscuring dust is contained in them.

Now, finally, with the help of their new Atacama Large Millimeter/sub millimeter Array telescope, or as the researchers very romantically named it, ALMA, scientists were finally able to confirm the way they had suspected for decades that galaxies were being formed.

The systems that act like stellar incubators are no longer a feature of the universe, but billions of years ago, they pumped out new stars up to thousands of times the rate of current production. The light from the cluster now reaching Earth is 11.5 billion years old and is offering a rare glimpse at the formation of massive, elliptical galaxies, which populate today’s universe but the formation of which is rarely observable.

Overall, the findings sit in accordance with theories stating where such huge star-forming galaxies should be found, and the research helps us to better understand how dark matter informs the structure of the Universe.

On the other hand, analyzing these galaxies is very challenging because they are often enveloped in dense clouds of dust and gas where new stars are born.

The discovery is important from the point of view to further understand how such monstrous galaxies form and evolve into huge elliptical galaxies. ALMA was able to offer ten times the sensitivity and 60 times the resolution of previous imaging attempts.

The researchers found that the young monstrous galaxies were located between dark matter filaments, which indicated that these galaxies are formed in areas with high concentrations of dark matter.

They then compared the readings to visible light observations made by the NAOJ’s Subaru Telescope, with that data indicating that a web of dark matter is present at the location – a filament structure that’s thought to be a progenitor of the largest structures in the Universe.

This dark matter web is crucial for understanding how this influences the earliest galaxies from the dawn of time, after the Big Bang event. The SSA22 one can be termed Proto-Great Wall.

We are living in a relatively quiet period in the history of the Universe.

The team then compared the positions of the baby galaxies with the location of the clusters of young galaxies 11.5 billion lightyears away in the SSA22 which had been observed in visible light by the Subaru Telescope (in Hawaii).

To fully understand how these form, astronomers needed to peer back into the early phases of the universe formation. There aren’t any of these huge galaxies left in the modern era, but they didn’t simply disappear.

Dark matter is invisible to us, and is the term scientists use to describe material that must exist but can not be seen.

This observation result was published as Umehata et al. English version is translated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.