It's the farthest-reaching megamaser ever discovered.
According
to a statement released by the institution on Thursday, an international team
of astronomers led by Dr. Marcin Glowacki, who previously worked at the
Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and the University of
the Western Cape in South Africa, has made an impressive discovery from 5
billion light-years away.
Using
the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa, the researchers discovered a powerful
radio-wave laser, called a ‘megamaser’,
that is the most distant megamaser of its kind ever detected. Its light
has traveled 58 thousand billion billion (58 followed by 21 zeros) kilometers
to Earth.
When galaxies collide...
What
caused that to happen? Megamasers are created when two galaxies collide
forcefully in the Universe.
"When
galaxies collide, the gas inside them gets extraordinarily thick, which can
cause focused beams of light to emerge," Glowacki explained. "This is
the first hydroxyl megamaser to be detected by MeerKAT, and it is also the most
distant hydroxyl megamaser ever spotted by any telescope." It's incredible
that we've already discovered a record-breaking megamaser after only one night
of observing. It demonstrates the telescope's superiority."
The
object was given the moniker 'Nkalakatha,' which is an isiZulu word that means
"huge boss," and the researchers stressed how incredible it was to
identify the record-breaking object in just one night of observations.
A single night of observations
"It's
remarkable that we detected a redshift record-breaking megamaser in a single
night of observations with MeerKAT." The whole 3000+ hour LADUMA survey
will be the most sensitive of its type, according to Glowacki, in a statement
released by the University of the Western Cape. Glowacki and his team are
currently working on a project called LADUMA, which stands for Looking at the
Distant Universe with the Meerkat Array.
The
team then set out to figure out where the megamaser was originating from. Fortunately,
the LADUMA team's region of sky had been observed in X-rays, optical light, and
infrared, making the object's host galaxy easy to locate.
But
their work still continues as the celestial object still has many mysteries to
unravel. “We have already planned follow-up observations of the megamaser, and
as LADUMA progresses we will make many more discoveries,” concluded Glowacki.
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