ALMA pinpoints early galaxies

A team of astronomers has used ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) to pinpoint the locations of over 100 of the most fertile star-forming galaxies in the early Universe.

This image shows close-ups of a selection of these galaxies. The ALMA observations, at submillimetre wavelengths, are shown in orange/red and are overlaid on an infrared view of the region as seen by the IRAC camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The best map so far of these distant dusty galaxies was made using the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), but the observations were not sharp enough to unambiguously identify these galaxies in images at other wavelengths. ALMA needed just two minutes per galaxy to pinpoint each one within a comparatively tiny region 200 times smaller than the broad APEX blobs, and with three times the sensitivity.