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An international team of researchers led by astronomer Marcin Glowacki, from the Center for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University in Australia, has just announced the discovery of a ‘megamaser’, a powerful emission of laser beams at the record distance of 5,000 million light years. The impressive finding, published on the ‘arXiv’ server, has been made with the radio telescope MeerKAT, in South Africa, made up of 64 13.5 meter antennas and specially designed to capture emissions from remote regions of the Universe. To reach Earth, the light from the megamaser had to cover a distance of 58,000 trillion trillion km (58 followed by 21 zeros).
“When galaxies collide,” Glowacki explains, “the gas they contain becomes extremely dense and can shoot out very concentrated beams of light.
This is the first such hydroxyl megamaser observed by MeerKAT and the most distant seen by any telescope to date. It is impressive that, with only one night of observations, we have already found an unprecedented megamaser. It shows how good the telescope is.”
During the merger of two galaxies, in fact, hydroxyl molecules are produced, composed of a hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom. When a molecule absorbs a photon at a wavelength of 18 cm, it emits two photons of the same wavelength. When the molecular gas is very dense, which is typical during a galactic merger, this emission becomes very bright and can be detected by radio telescopes on Earth.
The object, baptized with the Zulu expression ‘Nkalakatha‘, which means ‘big boss’, was located during the first night of a study of more than 3,000 hours of MeerKAT observations.
Glowacki and his team are using the telescope to look at very narrow but extremely deep swaths of the sky and measure atomic oxygen throughout the history of galaxies, from their distant past to the present. The combined study of hydroxyl and hydrogen masers will help astronomers better understand how the Universe has evolved over time.
According to the researcher, “we have follow-up observations of the megamaser planned and we hope to make many more discoveries.”
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