Discovered one of the brightest distant galaxies so far known

GTC/OSIRIS spectrum of BG1429+1202 showing strong Lyman-Alpha emission as well as strong absorptions from its interstellar medium and stellar winds. In insets panels, DECaLS grz color image, GTC g-band, and WHT i-band of BG1429+1202 are shown.
Advertised on
References
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.
News type