Radio signal from an ancient galaxie is the most distant radio signal ever detected
India has a huge radio telescope that picked up an astronomical signal. radio signal from the most distant galaxy ever – More than eight billion years ago.
It can be difficult to detect radio signals coming from distant galaxies. These signals are weaker as a galaxy moves further from Earth. Current radio telescopes have difficulty picking up these signals.
Montreal-based researchers and Indian scientists have captured radio signals at the 21 cm wavelength, which allows astronomers to see the secrets of the beginning universe.
“A galaxy emits different kinds of radio signals. Until now, it’s only been possible to capture this particular signal from a galaxy nearby, limiting our knowledge to those galaxies closer to Earth,” says Arnab Chakraborty, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at McGill University.
“But thanks to the help of a naturally occurring phenomenon called gravitational lensing, we can capture a faint signal from a record-breaking distance. This will help us understand the composition of galaxies at much greater distances from Earth.”
Researchers were able to detect the signal of a distant star-forming galaxy called SDSSJ0826+5630 for the first and measure its gas content.
Researchers found that the atomic masses of this particular galaxy are almost twice those of the stars we can see.
The team detected the signal from the galaxy at 4.9 billion years ago, which allowed them to see into the secrets of the early universe.
“It’s the equivalent to a look-back in time of 8.8 billion years,” says Chakraborty, who studies cosmology at McGill’s Department of Physics.
The signal was captured using ‘gravitational lensing’ where waves are ‘bent’ by large objects in between the object and our telescopes – working like a huge magnifying glass.
Co-author Nirupam Roy, an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Science says, “Gravitational lensing magnifies the signal coming from a distant object to help us peer into the early universe. In this particular case, the signal is affected by the presence between the target and the observer of another massive object, a galaxy. This effectively results in the magnification of the signal by a factor of 30, allowing the telescope to pick it up.”
According to the researchers, these results show that faraway galaxies can be observed in similar situations using gravitational lensesing.
It opens up new opportunities to probe the cosmic evolution of galaxies and stars using existing radio telescopes at low frequencies.
Hubble Space Telescope shows black hole eating star