Oldest-ever dust shines a light on early universe

• Autores: Shannon Hall
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3120, 2017, pág. 11
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The early universe was filthy. That much can be gleaned from newly detected cosmic dust in a galaxy whose light reaches the Earth from when the universe was only 600 million years old. The finding is a game changer that might ultimately show how quickly the early galaxies evolved. Nicolas Laporte at University College London and his colleagues turned ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array, to peer out at the early universe. They studied a star-forming galaxy called A2744_YD4, whose light dates back to just 200 million years after the birth of the earliest stars. With a little help from a foreground galaxy cluster called Abell 2744 which acted as a gravitational lens and thus magnified the distant galaxy by a factor of two, Laporte's team discovered the distant dust. To boot, there's enough of it that it could fill the sun 6 million times over