Deciphering compact galaxies in the young universe
Tuesday, March 8, 2016 - 06:00
in Astronomy & Space
A group of researchers using the Suprime-Cam instrument on the Subaru Telescope has discovered about 80 young galaxies that existed in the early universe about 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. The team made detailed analyses of imaging data of these galaxies taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope. At least 54 of the galaxies are spatially resolved in the ACS images. Among them, eight galaxies show double-component structures (Figure 1) and the remaining 46 seem to have elongated structures (Figure 2). Further investigations using a computer simulation revealed that the observed elongated structures can be reproduced if two or more galaxies reside in close proximity to each other.