Radio telescope spots previously unknown star-forming region
Scientists at the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimetrique (IRAM) have discovered that a region in the Medusa merger serves as home to thousands of recently formed stars. That region's called the Eye of Medusa, and it's a gas rich location smack-dab at the center of the merger, which, as its name implies, is a collision between two galaxies 100 million light-years away. The team has detected the newly birthed stars (pictured below the fold) for the first time using a powerful millimeter radio telescope in the French Alps called Northern Extended Millimeter Array or NOEMA. This discovery is actually a huge testament to how promising the observatory is, seeing as it's not even fully built yet: out of the 12 15-meter-diameter antennas planned for it, only seven are operational.
Millimeter radio telescopes give scientists a way to observe the cold parts of the universe, specifically gas and dust under -34 degrees Fahrenheit where stars usually form. So, how exactly did the IRAM team manage to detect the young stars when no other observatory could? According to the institute, the group led by Sabine Koenig, tried something new. Instead of programming NOEMA's antennas to detect carbon monoxide, which is common practice for millimeter radio telescopes, they configured it to detect hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and formylium (HCO+) molecules.
IRAM says that likely means the star formation process has a more complex chemical formulation than people think. It also proves that we still know very little about the universe. It's certainly something worth looking into, since galaxy collisions and the birth of stars are two important aspects in our quest to understand how galaxies form.
[Image Credit: André Rambaud, IRAM (NOEMA) / IRAM, NASA , ESA Hubble Space Telescope, Hubble Legacy Archive (Eye of Medusa)]
