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Chilean scientists discover hyperluminous galaxy with unprecedented features

CATA Associate Astronomer Rodrigo Herrera worked on the discovery through observations with ALMA and VLT.

A recent research carried out with the technology of telescopes located in Chile, allowed the discovery of a hyperluminous infrared galaxy (HyLIRG), which generated new perspectives on star formation in the universe. Rodrigo Herrera, Associate Astronomer of the Center for Astrophysics and Related Technologies, CATA, actively participated in this process.

The article “Detailed study of a rare hyperluminous rotating disk in an Einstein ring 10 billion years ago,” published by Nature Astronomy, along with a photograph taken by the European Southern Observatory, shows the distant galaxy PJ0116-24, a HyLIRG 10,000 times brighter than our Milky Way (in infrared light). “In the background, until now it was thought that extremely bright galaxies must be the result of galaxy mergers. The collisions of these galaxies trigger rapid star formation. But these new data indicate that isolated galaxies could also become HyLIRGs through internal processes, without interacting with other galaxies, if star-forming gas is rapidly channeled into the center of the galaxy.

Moreover, the interesting thing is that it is producing stars at a very high rate,” explains Rodrigo Herrera, who worked on the research led by Daizhong Liu, from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the Purple Mountain Observatory.

Such is the volume that, for comparison, the Milky Way creates approximately one solar mass per year, while the galaxy PJ0116-24 generates 1,500 solar masses per year. The research involved observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) with its new Enhanced Resolution Imaging and Spectrograph (ERIS), which detects warm gas, shown in red in the photograph. Investigations with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), which detects cold gas, shown in blue, were also added to study the motion of the gas inside PJ0116-24.

The CATA Associate Astronomer also highlights the importance of this work having been carried out with instruments and telescopes located in our country, which ratifies Chile’s status as the world capital of astronomy.

“CATA’s support is also key in these processes. On the one hand, we are strongly connected with our international collaborators in making these great discoveries that are published in first level journals, such as Nature, and, at the same time, in the Center we have an area specifically dedicated to the evolution of galaxies, where a group of researchers work on expanding knowledge regarding how galaxies formed and evolved, and this particular discovery fits super well with CATA’s lines of research that tries to answer this question”, says Rodrigo Herrera. Also in favor of this research is the fact that a foreground galaxy acted as a gravitational lens, amplifying the light from PJ0116-24 behind it into the Einstein ring.

This precise cosmic alignment allows astronomers to zoom in on very distant objects, such as this galaxy located 10 billion light-years away, and see them in a level of detail that would otherwise be very difficult to achieve.

What’s next, the CATA Associate Astronomer points out, lays an important foundation, demonstrating that there is a population of galaxies that was not on the radar before. Therefore, we must now continue to build these surveys (catalogs) to continue detecting more of these hyperluminous galaxies. In addition, to derive in a more systematic study of the properties of this type of galaxies, to try to make a census that gives information of, for example, what percentage is forming as many stars as the recently discovered one.