Using the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the U.S., an international team of astronomers has detected a faint signal emitted by hydrogen gas in a galaxy over five billion light years away, smashing the previous cosmic record.
The team detected the radio emissions from hydrogen, the most abundant gas in the universe, in a distant galaxy and discovered that it would have possessed billion of young large young stars engulfed in clouds of hydrogen gas, which is the raw fuel used for star creation.
Before the current study, scientists have only been able to use radio telescopes to detect hydrogen emissions signatures from nearby galaxies.
"Due to the upgrade of the Very Large Array, this is the first time we've been able to directly measure atomic hydrogen in a galaxy this far from Earth," said Ximena Fernández of Rutgers University and lead author of the study.
"These signals would have begun their journey before our planet even existed, and after five billion years of travelling through space without hitting anything, they've fallen into the telescope and allowed us to see this distant galaxy for the very first time," she added.
The goal of the project is to see further distances into the universe, which requires the use of bigger, more advances telescopes and prompts the discovery of older objects.
"This is precisely the goal of the project, to study how gas in galaxies has changed through history," Fernández said.
"A question we hope to answer is whether galaxies in the past had more gas being turned into stars than galaxies today. Our record breaking find is a galaxy with an unusually large amount of hydrogen."
The team used the VLA radio telescope in order to collect data for the COSMOS HI Large Extragalactic Survey (CHILES), collecting data from more than 1,000 hours of observing time.
Using a new approach, the team was able to collective large amounts of data.
"It's fast becoming more about the data and how you move, store and analyze vast volumes of information," said Andreas Wicenec, head of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and co-author of the study.
"Big science needs a lot of compute power - right now we're designing systems to manage data for several large facilities around the world and the next generation of radio telescopes, including China's 500m radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array and the SKA's pathfinder telescopes that are already up and running in outback Western Australia."
The findings were published in the May 31 issue of the pre-print server arXiv.
