Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News
New images of gas churning inside an ancient starburst galaxy help explain why this galactic firecracker underwent such frenzied star formation.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, researchers have taken the most detailed views of the disk of star-forming gas that permeated the galaxy COSMOS-AzTEC-1, which dates back to when the universe was less than 2 billion years old. The telescope observations, reported online August 29 in Nature, reveal an enormous reservoir of molecular gas that was highly susceptible to collapsing and forging new stars.
COSMOS-AzTEC-1 and its starburst contemporaries have long puzzled astronomers, because these galaxies cranked out new stars about 1,000 times as fast as the Milky Way does. According to standard theories of cosmology, galaxies shouldn’t have grown up fast…
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