ALMA

Astronomers at NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered at least six early galaxies, massive in size, which were “dead” when the universe was about 3 billion years old. These galaxies had run out of cold hydrogen, something necessary for the formation of stars. With no fuel to form stars, the galaxies were running “empty”, NASA said.   Lead author Kate Whitaker said that at this point in the universe — 3 billion years after the Big Bang — all galaxies should…

There's alcohol up in space. No, it's not bottles of wine discarded by careless astronauts; rather, it's in microscopic molecular form. Now researchers think they've discovered the largest alcohol molecule in space yet, in the form of propanol.  Propanol molecules exist in two forms, or isomers, both of which have now been identified in observations: normal-propanol, which has been detected in a star-forming region for the first time, and iso-propanol (the key ingredient in hand sanitizer), which has never been seen in…

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have imaged a snake-like galaxy. Scientists named the galaxy NGC 1087, and it is swirling through space almost 80,000 light-years from our planet. ALMA’s image of this snake-like galaxy is breathtaking Image source: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Pacaud, D. Coe The snake-like galaxy spans over 86,800 light-years across. It can be found within the constellation Cetus. This particular part of the…