In just one night of observation, scientists discovered a new record maker – the farthest megamaser ever seen to date.
The megamaser is a very powerful laser made with microwave light (hence maser). Megamasers come in a number of different flavors, but the scientist found it to be the most common, showing the symbolism of hydroxyl, a molecule made up of one atom of oxygen and one atom of oxygen. of hydrogen. The team argues that the newly discovered megamaser, which is one of the best lights seen today, marks a galactic confusion.
“When two galaxies such as the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy meet, rays of light emerge from the meeting and can be seen at a distance from Earth,” he said. says Jeremy Darling, author of the new research and astrophysicist at the University of Colorado. a To say released by the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, participated in the research. “The OH [hydroxyl] Megamasers act like twinkling lights that say: here is a cluster of galaxies forming new stars and feeding into large black holes. “
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“Megamasers are coming out of a big mess,” Hayley Roberts, an author on the new research and an astrophysics graduate student at Colorado University Boulder, said at one. To say.
Information comes from the MeerKAT page, a collection of 64 visitors published in a region of South Africa. The company has started a new project looking for hydrogen signals at a distance the whole worldlooking for what some researchers have called a “cosmic vuvuzela,” a horn that stretches out until scientists can see the entire universe as its looking at less than 5 billion years.
(The program Looking at Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array, or Laduma, which means “thunder” in Zulu, is called “thunder” and is what South American footballers shout about to celebrate goals. project site separation. The vuvuzela noisemaker was very popular throughout the 2010 World Cup, held in South Africa.)
The Laduma project will involve more than 3,000 hours of observation – but scientists haven’t waited long to find out.
“It’s amazing, with one night of watching, we’ve first seen a record megamaser,” Marcin Glowacki, an astronomer at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement. University language. “Showing how good the telescope is.”
Scientists have dubbed the megamaser Nkalakatha, which means “supreme leader” in isiZulu, one of South Africa’s official languages, in the opinion of one student.
Nkalakatha emerges from a galaxy with a radio-shining tail on one side, as the saying goes, and its light is about 5 billion years old.
And Nkalakatha isn’t the only megamaser whose research project has been able to add to the map. “MeerKAT is likely to double the number of known cases of these rare events,” said Darling. “Galaxies have been thought to be more frequent in the past, and the new OH megamasers that have been seen will allow us to test this hypothesis.”
The results are shown in a paper published on Wednesday (April 6) on the preprint site arXiv.org and allowed for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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