Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2022

27 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022 the European Space Agency’s Her- schel Space Observatory and later observed with the Chile-based ALMA, is extraordinarily bright for its distance. The ALMA data con- firmed that the exceptional lumi- nosity of NGP–190387 was partly caused by another known massive galaxy, located between NGP– 190387 and the Earth, very close to the line of sight. This massive galaxy amplified the light observed by Franco and his collaborators, en- abling them to spot the faint radia- tion emitted billions of years ago by the fluorine in NGP–190387. Future studies of NGP–190387 with the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) — ESO’s new flagship project, under construction in Chile and set to start operations later this decade — could reveal further secrets about this galaxy. “ALMA is sensitive to ra- diation emitted by cold interstellar gas and dust,” says Chentao Yang, an ESO Fellow in Chile. “With the ELT, we will be able to observe NGP– 190387 through the direct light of stars, gaining crucial information on the stellar content of this galaxy.” the University of Hertfordshire. “Our measurement adds a completely new constraint on the origin of flu- orine, which has been studied for two decades.” The discovery in NGP–190387 marks one of the first detections of fluo- rine beyond the Milky Way and its neighbouring galaxies. Astronomers have previously spotted this ele- ment in distant quasars, bright ob- jects powered by supermassive black holes at the centre of some galaxies. But never before had this element been observed in a star-forming galaxy so early in the history of the Universe. The team’s detection of fluorine was a chance discovery made possible thanks to the use of space and ground-based observatories. NGP– 190387, originally discovered with ! A new finding, made with the ALMA observatory, in which ESO is a partner, is shedding light on how fluorine is forged in the Universe. Find out more in this discovery, and how it is related to our dental hygiene, in this video summary. [ESO]