With the advent of modern telescopes and astronomical observations, astronomers have been able to identify many distant galaxies. These were some of the first galaxies to form the Universe that began to fall back on us as the Universe expanded. In fact, at a certain distance, the GalaxyGalaxy appears to be moving away from us in an instant.
Interestingly, we can also estimate how fast the GalaxyGalaxy moves when constructed based on how its “reddish” emissions appear. This is similar to the Doppler effect, in which objects moving away from the viewer emit light that seems to have shifted in wavelength (hence the term “redshift”) to the viewer.
The Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, located in the middle of the Atacama Desert in Chile, is especially suitable for observing such variations in the Galaxy’s orbit. Recently, a team of international researchers, including Professor Akio Inoue and graduate student Tsuyoshi Tokuoka of Waseda University, Japan; Drs. Takuya Hashimoto at Tsukuba University, Japan; Professor Richard S. Ellis at University College London; and Drs. Nicolas Laporte, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, has observed a modified version of the long Galaxy, MACS1149-JD1 (hereafter JD1), which has led to some interesting conclusions. “Apart from discovering the high-redshift, that is, the farthest galaxies, studying its internal gases and galaxies provides the impetus for understanding the process of galaxy formation in the ancient universe that is possible,” explains Ellis. The findings of their study were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Galaxy’sGalaxy’s formation begins with the accumulation of gas and continues with the construction of stars in that GalaxyGalaxy. Over time, the star’s appearance progresses from the center to the outside, the galactic disk grows, and the GalaxyGalaxy acquires a particular shape. As star formation continues, new stars form on the rotating disk while old stars settle in the center. Studying the age of the astronomical objects and the movement of stars and gases in the GalaxyGalaxy makes it possible to determine the evolutionary stage the GalaxyGalaxy has reached.
Carrying out a series of observations over two months, astronomers successfully measured the slightest difference in the “redshift” from place to place within the GalaxyGalaxy. They found that JD1 satisfied the Galaxy’sGalaxy’s orbit. Next, they likened the GalaxyGalaxy to a rotating disk and found that it reproduced what they had seen. The calculated rotational speed was about 30 miles [50 km] per second, compared with the rotational speed of the Milky Way disk at 120 miles per second. The team also measured the range of JD1 at only 3,000 light-years, much smaller than the Milky Way by 100,000 light-years wide.
The significance of their effect is that JD1 is far from, therefore, an ancient yet discovered source with a rotating disk of gas and stars. Consistent with the exact estimates of the closest systems in the research literature, this has allowed the team to explain the gradual development of orbiting galaxies over 95% of our cosmic history.
