Merging galaxies in the early universe captured with ALMA.

13 November, 2017 / Read time: 1 minute

Animation zoom-in of the composite image of ADFS galaxy pair. The initial image is from ESA's Herschel Space Observatory. The object was then detected by the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) telescope. The, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which image is shown in the final zoom, was able to identify two galaxies: ADFS-27N (for North) and ADFS-27S (for South).

The starbursting galaxies are about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth and destined to merge into a single, massive galaxy.

Credit: ESA/Herschel; ESO/APEX; ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); D. Riechers et al. 2017