When a giant blob of gas and dust was spotted somewhere on the further reaches of the universe, the astronomical world was set abuzz with intrigue and controversy. The reason, not because that it was as it seems to be, it glows a bright green.
As mysterious as it was, scientists have finally figured out why the substance that covers a huge sector in space is glowing the way it does and a bright green for that matter.
"For a long time, the origin of the extended Lyman-alpha light has been controversial," said Jim Geach, a Royal Society University Research Fellow based in the Centre for Astrophysics Research.
"But with the combination of new observations and cutting-edge simulations, we think we have solved a 15-year-old mystery."
First, the blob's core contained two huge galaxies surrounded by a swarm of very much smaller galaxies indicating a birth of a massive bundle of new galaxies.
According to a 2011 study, the polarized light that was being emitted from the blob could have come from the cluster of galaxies.
Now, new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and Very Large Telescope, VLT, that is operated by the European Southern Observatory have pinpointed the two large galaxies as being the sources of this mysterious light.
Other new observations that were conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii were responsible for divulging the bundle of small, faint galaxies surrounding the bigger two in the heart of the blob where they are forming stars 100 times faster than the rate of the Milky Way.
These "Lyman-alpha blobs" are extremely gargantuan, yes, with "gargantuan" included and that's not an overrated observation. As a matter of fact, this particular space blob also named SSA22-Lyman-alpha Blob 1 or LAB-1 is the largest of its kind measuring about 300,000 light years across or three times the size of our own Milky Way galaxy.
