In this loooong overdue post, I’m going to talk about what happened following the events of my previous post. In that post, I talked about how my research team and I used the Keck 10 meter telescope to obtain spectroscopy of 43 distant galaxies. To briefly recap, my group and I have been using CANDELS images to search for very distant galaxies (those that we see as they were within one billion years of the Big Bang, which gives them a redshift greater than 6). In a few previous posts, I’ve talked about some of the exciting things we’ve been learning in the distant universe, including how these galaxies get redder with time (as they build up their heavy elements; i.e. planet-making material), and whether galaxies can account for the reionization of the universe (yes! we think).
In this previous post, we talked about how we use images to find these galaxies - essentially, since they are so far away, they are moving very quickly away from us, thus their light is redshifted due to the Doppler effect. Ideally, you would take a spectrum of every galaxy to search for redshifted emission lines to measure your redshift. However, this is impractical for samples of hundreds or thousands of galaxies. On the bright side, we can get a rough estimate of the redshift using imaging alone, and this technique has been well-documented over the past ~20 years.
The downside of this is that 1) the redshift is only approximate, and that makes everything else you learn a little more uncertain; and 2) its possible that some galaxies you think are really distant are actually close by galaxies that just happen to be very red. To get around this, we typically try to take spectra of a small portion of our sample, to verify that our contamination is small. Fast forward, and this is why we went to Keck, to try to measure the redshifts for many of our distant galaxy candidates.
As I looked at the data we took at Keck, we found a very bright emission line from one of our distant galaxy candidates before we even left Hawaii. This left me feeling very optimistic! However, as we continued to analyze our data, we found that the first line we saw would be the only line we would see - out of the 43 observed galaxies, we detected an emission line from only a single one. This may seem like a failure, but lets examine our detected galaxy a little more closely.
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| This image shows a region of the CANDELS GOODS-North field, just above the handle of the Big Dippler. Highlighted is z8_GND_5296, the most distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy in the universe. The galaxy looks very red in this image, as it is so distant (and thus moving so quickly away from us), that it is only detected in Hubble's reddest filters. Image Credit: V. Tilvi, S. Finkelstein, C. Papovich, A. Koekemoer, CANDELS and STScI/NASA. |
The emission line we saw was the Lyman alpha line from hydrogen. This line is emitted in the ultraviolet, but we saw it all the way in the infrared, meaning that it has a very high redshift. In fact, the measured redshift of this galaxy is 7.5, making it the highest redshift spectroscopically confirmed galaxy*** (the previous record was at 7.2). That's exciting in itself, but the galaxy had more in store for us. Using how bright it is in the CANDELS imaging, we can measure how fast this galaxy is converting hydrogen gas into new stars, and we found that its “star-formation rate” is an insane 300 solar masses per year; this is 150 times faster than the Milky Way!!! From what we (thought we) knew at high redshift, if you found a random redshift seven galaxy, you would have expected it to be forming stars at around 10 solar masses per year, so this galaxy is forming stars 30 times faster than its peers.
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| Our spectrum from the MOSFIRE spectrograph on the Keck 10 meter telescope. The white blob in the top panel shows Lyman alpha emission from z8_GND_5296. At the observed wavelength, this corresponds to a redshift of 7.5078. The bottom panel shows a cross-cut of the top spectrum (what we call a one-dimensional spectrum), which shows the galaxy's flux versus wavelength. You can see the peak corresponding to Lyman-alpha emission (highlighted by the red line). There are a number of other peaks too, which all correspond to the position of emission lines from our own atmosphere. These are very bright, and we try to subtract them out, so what you see here are residuals. The lines are difficult to subtract completely, because their intensity changes rapidly with time. |
Not only has this level of star factory not been seen at these redshifts before, but it was also a complete surprise to theorists, who do not see such galaxies in their models. While this galaxy could just be a weirdo, we don’t think thats the case. The previous record redshift holder I mentioned, at z=7.2, has a star-formation rate of 100 solar masses per year. Smaller, yes, but still very high. And, it is located in the same region of the sky as our galaxy. What are the odds?!? What we think we’re learning is that these extreme star factories are much more common in the early universe than previously thought, so now we need to get with our theorist friends and try to figure out why that is.
As for the other 42 galaxies we didn’t see? The jury is still out. It may be that the gas between galaxies is becoming neutral (as would happen if we’re entering the epoch of reionization), and this neutral gas “fog” is screening us from seeing the Lyman alpha photons. Or, it could be that these distant galaxies are becoming increasingly rich in gas themselves, preventing these Lyman alpha photons from escaping. Only time and further study will tell, but we’re hot on the trail! If you're interested in all the details, you can see our paper, which has been published in Nature, here, and our official press release, which is here.
***Often in the news there are articles about the most distant galaxies in the universe - some of these are spectroscopically confirmed like our galaxy here, while others are candidate galaxies, meaning that their redshifts have not been verified. While many of these candidates turn out to be real, measuring the redshift spectroscopically is the gold standard for galaxy distance measurements. A case in point is our recent blog post, which mentions a galaxy with a redshift of close to 11 from the CLASH survey. This galaxy has not been spectroscopically confirmed (though Hubble will try to do it in a few months). However, in the particular case of this galaxy, I think its highly likely that its real, as not only are its colors that expected of such a distant galaxy, but the positions of the lensed images are what you would expect for a galaxy at the estimated redshift. Hopefully Hubble will measure a redshift, and, if not, then we’ll have to wait a few years for the next generation of telescopes.
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