UMass alums discover never-before-seen ‘monster galaxy’
Monster galaxies were once thought to be as elusive as Bigfoot. Not anymore.
It took roughly 12.5 billion years at the speed of light for its signal to reach Earth, and it was just a “little faint blob” when the group of astronomers saw it. But there it was, once thought to be as elusive as Bigfoot: a monster galaxy.Never heard of a monster galaxy? Well, up until this recent discovery, no one had seen one, and their existence was questionable.In fact, this group of astronomers — led by a UMass Amherst alum, Christina Williams, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona, and including UMass alum Kate Whitaker, now an assistant professor at the university — were actually attempting to answer a different question about faraway galaxies altogether when they made their accidental discovery.“What makes this galaxy really novel is that there’s sort of a combination of two things,” Whitaker said in an interview with Boston.com. “One is that it’s incredibly massive and it’s forming lots of new stars, so it has about as much mass, as many stars as the Milky Way, but way more gas, much, much more gas and that’s the fuel for the new star formation.”Basically, the monster galaxy is forming many new stars at a rapid pace — about 100 times faster than our galaxy, Ivo Labbe, a co-author of the study at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, said in a news release from UMass.While an artist rendering shows a cloudy, bright magenta blob, Whitaker said the blob she and her colleagues saw was far less interesting.“It’s really unimpressive,” she said, noting that because of how far away the galaxy is, detail of what it looks like is lost. “The artist impression is one idea of what it would look like if we could see it in much higher detail, higher resolution. What we see is a sadly unimpressive, little faint blob.”It took the latest technology to be able to see the galaxy, according to Whitaker. Astronomers used the ALMA, or Atacama Large Millimeter Array. It’s a group of 66 radio telescopes perched in Chile’s mountains, the release said. The equipment is very sensitive, Whitaker said, and can see things at longer wavelengths. Plus, a monster galaxy has a lot of dust so, combined with how far away it is, that makes it undetectable with more traditional methods of astronomy.Astronomers aren’t sure how many monster galaxies there are out there. “It was by accident that we found it and so until you do more systematic studies at these longer wavelengths at that sensitivity, that extreme sensitivity because it’s so distant, soon I hope we’ll know. But we don’t actually quite have the full picture together of how common these types of galaxies are,” Whitaker said.
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