A team of astronomers has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to detect glowing oxygen in a distant galaxy seen just 700 million years after the Big Bang. This is the most distant galaxy in which oxygen has ever been unambiguously detected, and it is most likely being ionised by powerful radiation from young giant stars. This galaxy could be an example of one type of source responsible for cosmic reionisation in the early history of the Universe.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array [ALMA], and many other telescopes on the ground and in space, an international team of astronomers obtained the best view yet of a collision that took place between two galaxies when the Universe was only half its current age. They enlisted the help of a galaxy-sized magnifying glass to reveal otherwise invisible detail. These new studies of the galaxy H-ATLAS J142935.3-002836 have shown that this complex and distant object looks like the well-known …
After 10 years of construction the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array [ALMA] based in Chile was inaugurated on 13 March 2013. The ceremony marks the completion of all the major systems of the giant telescope and the formal transition from a construction project to a fully-fledged observatory.ALMA is funded by an international partnership comprised of the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere [ESO], by the U.S. National Science Foundation [NSF] and by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences [NINS] of Japan…