Astronomers have discovered a galaxy in the very distant Universe that looks like a heart – a perfect reminder for Valentine’s Day, that love truly transcends both space and time. The galaxy was captured by the powerful ALMA telescope in Chile, which reveals how light from a distant galaxy is curved by a more nearby galaxy in a process called gravitational lensing. The result is a spectacular and unusual heart shape.
“The shape is really a cosmic coincidence. It would not look like this in any other galaxy than ours, so it is a show just for us”, says Tom Bakx, post doctoral researcher at Chalmers.
The galaxy is called HERS-16, and it is part of a major study of more than 100 galaxies, all of whom have been bent into shapes that we don’t normally associate with galaxies.
“The gravitational lensing distorts the shape, but it also magnifies the galaxy so we can see more details. And due to increasingly better telescopes, we can observe galaxies with a lot of these weird shapes, morphologies, that we don't see in the local universe”, says Tom Bakx, who works in the international research project Z-GAL.
The aim of the project is to study the early evolution of massive galaxies. The astronomers are using the ALMA telescope (link/photo), which is the only telescope that can pierce through the dust surrounding these rapidly evolving galaxies at high enough resolution to see all their wonderful shapes. There are more than a 100 galaxies in the study.
“It's just fantastic to browse through these catalogues of hundreds of objects – and HERS-16 really stood out with its unique shape”.
“What we see in the image is basically most of the galaxy’s heat radiation, emanating from where it is building up most of its stars. This could mean that it is rapidly evolving from one galaxy type to another, which gives us new clues about why the Universe looks the way it does”, says Tom.
The researchers in the project will continue to process the observational data from all the different galaxies, focusing on the really complicated work of “unlensing” the distorted shapes, in order to see which shapes they really have.
“The heart shape in the image is a projection effect, in a way similar to a rainbow – only visible from a certain perspective. So, the galaxy is sending us, and only us, this heart”.
While the search goes on for evidence of life in the Universe, at least now we can say that we have found some proof that there is love out there – in the form of a galaxy billions of light-years away.
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You can read more about the super sensitive receivers in the ALMA telescope, some which have been developed by the Group for Advanced Receiver Development at Chalmers: Nya mottagare lovar nya insikter om våra kosmiska ursprung.