NGC 6334 in Submillimeter Wavelengths

This image of the star formation region NGC 6334 is one of the first scientific images from the ArTeMiS instrument on APEX. The picture shows the glow detected at a wavelength of 0.35 millimeters coming from dense clouds of interstellar dust grains. The new observations from ArTeMiS show up in orange and have been superimposed on a view of the same region taken in near-infrared light by ESO’s VISTA telescope at Paranal.

Image credit: ArTeMiS team/Ph. André, M. Hennemann, V. Revéret et al./ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit

Note: For more information, see The Cool Glow of Star Formation.

Early Galaxies Found by ALMA

A team of astronomers has used ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) to pinpoint the locations of over 100 of the most fertile star-forming galaxies in the early Universe.

The best map so far of these distant dusty galaxies was made using the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), but the observations were not sharp enough to unambiguously identify these galaxies in images at other wavelengths. ALMA needed just two minutes per galaxy to pinpoint each one within a comparatively tiny region 200 times smaller than the broad APEX blobs, and with three times the sensitivity.

This image shows six of the galaxies as seen in the sharp new observations by ALMA (in red). The big red circles indicate the regions where galaxies had been detected by APEX. The earlier telescope did not have sharp enough images to pin down the identity of the galaxies, many candidates appear in each circle. The ALMA observations, at submillimeter wavelengths, are overlaid on an infrared view of the region as seen by the IRAC camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope (colored blue).

Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO), J. Hodge et al., A. Weiss et al., NASA Spitzer Science Center

Note: For more information, see ALMA Pinpoints Early Galaxies at Record Speed.

Star Formation in Messier 78

Astronomers have discovered some of the youngest stars ever seen thanks to the Herschel space observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions. Dense envelopes of gas and dust surround the fledging stars known as protostars, making their detection difficult until now. The discovery gives scientists a window into the earliest and least understood phases of star formation.

The new results come from the Herschel Orion Protostar Survey (HOPS), led by the University of Toledo. HOPS has looked at the vast stellar nursery in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, the biggest site of star formation near our solar system, located in the constellation of Orion.

A portion of the survey is shown here in two side-by-side images of the same region around the nebula Messier 78 where several of 15 new protostars were found. Herschel detected the extremely young protostars -- indicated in the image by the four circles -- that were too cold to be picked up in previous scans of the area by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Radio wave observations from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile, a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden and the European Southern Observatory in Germany, further confirmed the newfound protostars' presence.

On the left, the nebula Messier 78 is shown in a three-color composite from the three telescopes just mentioned. In green is the 160-micron, far-infrared light collected by Herschel's Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS). Appearing in blue is 24-micron light from Spitzer. Finally, 870-micron radio wave light gathered by APEX glows red.

On the right the same region appears in a separate three-color composite that shows infrared observations from two instruments aboard NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Blue represents 3.6- and 4.5-micron light and green shows light of 5.8 and 8 microns, both captured by Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC). Red is 24-micron light detected by Spitzer's Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS).

Image credit: NASA/ESA/ESO/JPL-Caltech/Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy

Note: For more information, see Herschel Discovers Some of the Youngest Stars Ever Seen.

NGC 1999

A new image from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile shows a beautiful view of clouds of cosmic dust in the region of Orion. While these dense interstellar clouds seem dark and obscured in visible-light observations, APEX’s LABOCA camera can detect the heat glow of the dust and reveal the hiding places where new stars are being formed. The image shows the region around the reflection nebula NGC 1999 in visible light, with the APEX observations overlaid in brilliant orange tones that seem to set the dark clouds on fire.

Image credit: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/T. Stanke et al./Digitized Sky Survey 2

Note: For more information, see Setting the Dark on Fire.

Artist's Conception of Quasar 3C 279

This is an artist’s impression of the quasar 3C 279. Astronomers connected the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), in Chile, to the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, USA, and the Submillimeter Telescope (SMT) in Arizona, USA for the first time, to make the sharpest observations ever, of the center of a distant galaxy, the bright quasar 3C 279. Quasars are the very bright centers of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes. This quasar contains a black hole with a mass about one billion times that of the Sun, and is so far from Earth that its light has taken more than 5 billion years to reach us. The team were able to probe scales of less than a light-year across the quasar — a remarkable achievement for a target that is billions of light-years away.

Illustration credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Note: For more information, see APEX Takes Part in Sharpest Observation Ever.