In the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the mass of a galaxy acts on the light of a more distant object, as if it were a huge lens, producing a distorted image with the form of a so-called Einstein ring or multiple images and a magnification of the total flux, allowing to see details which would otherwise be too faint to detect. GTC/OSIRIS spectroscopic observations allowed to discover one of the brightest galaxies in the early Universe, BG1429+1202, located at a redshift of 2.82 (we see it as it was some 2,300 million years after the Big Bang). BG1429+1202 is a Lyman-Alpha Emitting galaxy (LAE) gravitationally lensed by a massive Early Type galaxy close to the line of sight at a redshift of 0.55. Although typical LAEs are faint and not very luminous, BG1429+1202 is not only apparently bright but also intrinsically very luminous after accounting for the lensing magnification, showing indications of massive star formation. This galaxy-scale strong gravitational system was found in the BELLS GALLERY project that analysed around a million and a half spectra of galaxies obtained with the Sloan Telescope, at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico (USA), by the BOSS survey, part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III.
It may interest you
-
In the 90s, the COBE satellite discovered that not all the microwave emission from our Galaxy behaved as expected. Part of this signal was later assigned to a fresh new emission component, spatially correlated with the Galactic dust emission, which showed greater importance in the microwave range of frequencies. It has been named since as “anomalous microwave emission”, or AME. The current main hypothesis to explain the AME origin is that it is emitted by small dust particles which undergo fast spinning movements. In Fernández-Torreiro et al. (2023), we study the observational properties of
Advertised on -
The standard cosmological model states that massive galaxies contain a large fraction of dark matter. Dark matter is a transparent substance that does not interact through regular baryonic matter and is only detected through its gravitational pull over the stars and the gas. NGC 1277 is known as the prototype of a relic galaxy, that is, a galaxy that has not accreted other galaxies since it formed. Relic galaxies are extremely rare and are the untouched remains of the giant galaxies that populated the early Universe. Since relic galaxies are very important to understand the conditions in the
Advertised on -
The amount and complexity of data delivered by modern galaxy surveys has been steadily increasing over the past years. New facilities will soon provide imaging and spectra of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Extracting coherent scientific information from these large and multi-modal data sets remains an open issue for the community and data-driven approaches such as deep learning have rapidly emerged as a potentially powerful solution to some long lasting challenges. This enthusiasm is reflected in an unprecedented exponential growth of publications using neural networks, which have gone
Advertised on