no introduction needed Albert Einstein, but not all the ideas, theses and theories of the German physicist are valued or remembered by the scientific community. One of them forgotten It has allowed us to find galaxies we didn’t even know existed.
For example, a few weeks ago, from the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope network in Chile, Astronomers have discovered an “invisible galaxy,” defined as a galaxy so distant and dim that it had gone undetected in previous searches..
The scientists explained in an article in The Astrophysical Journal, cited in xatakathat the image obtained corresponds to a galaxy from a young universe, when only 2,000 million years had passed since the Big Bang, about 11,700 million years ago.
This “invisible galaxy” is compact, contains a large amount of interstellar dust and is very active in its formation of new stars, at a rate a thousand times faster than the Milky Way creates new suns.
The relativistic magnifying glass
The discovery of this and other distant galaxies is possible thanks to a circumstance related to a work by Einstein, the relativistic magnifying glass, which maintains that gravity is capable of affecting the trajectory of light beams that pass near a very massive object.
In this way, galaxies and stars located halfway between us and distant objects that we want to observe, work as a lens that increases the capacity of our own telescopes.
On the discovery of the invisible galaxy, Marika Giulietti, lead author of the study, analyzed: “Very distant galaxies are veritable mines of information about the past and future evolution of our universe. Even so, studying them is a great challenge. (These galaxies are) very compact and therefore difficult to observe”.
In the case of the ALMA network, its telescopes take advantage of wavelengths longer than the characteristics of the visible spectrum. This has two advantages when detecting very distant objects: the redshift that light undergoes as it travels great distances through stretching space and stretches its wavelength with itand these wavelengths manage to penetrate the interstellar dust that obscures the most distant galaxies.
“The cause of this dimming is the massive presence of interstellar dust, which intercepts the visible light from young stars, making it difficult to detect with optical instruments, and re-emitting it in longer waves where it can be observed only with powerful sub-band interferometers. )millimeter and radiusGiulietti concluded.