Scientists discover distant galaxy 1,000 times brighter than Milky Way
Scientists have discovered a very distant galaxy, some 10 thousand million light years away, which is about 1,000 times brighter than the Milky Way.
It is the brightest of the submillimetre galaxies, which have a very strong emission in the far infrared, researchers said.
Scientists led by Anastasio Diaz-Sanches from Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT) in Spain used gravitational lensing that acts as a sort of magnifier, changing the size and intensity of the apparent image of the original object.
“Thanks to the gravitational lens produced by a cluster of galaxies between ourselves and the source, which acts as if it was a telescope, the galaxy appears 11 times bigger and brighter than it really is, and appears as several images on an arc centred on the densest part of the cluster, which is known as an Einstein Ring,” said Diaz-Sanchez.
“The advantage of this kind of amplification is that it does not distort the spectral properties of the light, which can be studied for these very distant objects as if they were much nearer,” Diaz-Sanchez said.
To find this galaxy, a search of the whole sky was carried out, combining the data bases of the satellites WISE and Planck in order to identify the …read more