Dust Obscured Galaxies in the Early Universe
While investigating new data of our Large Program REBELS with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile our team noticed unexpected emissions coming from seemingly empty regions in space. To our surprise, we found that this radiation was emitted billions of years ago and actually came from two previously invisible galaxies completely hidden by clouds of cosmic gas and dust. This discovery suggests that numerous such galaxies might still be hidden in the early Universe, many more than we were expecting.
In our paper that was just published in Nature (Fudamoto et al. 2021; see here for a preprint version), we report this serendipitous discovery and describe the implications for the build-up of early galaxies.
(Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope)
Our local press release in French can be found here.
The international press release is here.
And a local radio interview (in French) is here.
Sep 22, 2021