Dancing Galaxies Make a Monster at the Cosmic Dawn

Using the combined power of the Subaru Telescope and the ALMA radio telescope, astronomers have discovered a system where two distant galaxies, located 12.8 billion light-years away, are in the process of merging. These galaxies, hosting faint quasars at their centers, could be the ancestors of the brightest and most massive quasars in the early Universe, shedding light on the mysterious processes that trigger the explosive growth of supermassive black holes.

What is ALMA Astronomy News?

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) -the largest astronomical project in existence- is a single telescope of revolutionary design, composed of 66 high precision antennas located in northern Chile. ALMA is an international partnership of ESO (Europe), NSF (U.S) and NINS (Japan) together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile We love the Cosmos!