A CSIRO radio telescope has detected the raw material for making the first stars in galaxies that formed when the Universe was just three billion years old — less than a quarter of its current age. This opens the way to studying how these early galaxies make their first stars.
The telescope is CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array telescope near Narrabri, NSW. “It one of very few telescopes in the world that can do such difficult work, because it is both extremely sensitive and can receive radio waves of the right wavelengths,” says CSIRO astronomer Professor Ron Ekers.
The raw material for making stars is cold molecular hydrogen gas, H2. It can’t be detected directly but its presence is revealed by a ‘tracer’ gas, carbon monoxide (CO), which emits radio waves.
In one project, astronomer Dr Bjorn Emonts (CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science) and his colleagues used the…
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