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September 23, 2021

Uncovering galaxies buried in dust at the cosmic dawn

Two previously invisible galaxies completely hidden by clouds of cosmic gas and dust have been discovered by an international team of researchers. While investigating new data of young, extremely distant galaxies observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, astronomers noticed unexpected emissions coming from seemingly empty regions of space. The team, which includes a Penn State scientist, discovered that the radiation was emitted billions of years ago and came from two dust-enshrouded galaxies. This discovery suggests that numerous such galaxies might still be hidden in the early universe, many more than researchers were expecting.

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About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.