Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2022

41 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING The research is published in The As- trophysical Journal . SPT0311-58 is actually made up of two galaxies, and was first seen by ALMA scientists in 2017 at its loca- tion, or time, in the Epoch of Reion- ization. This epoch occurred at a time when the Universe was just 780 million years old—roughly 5-percent of its current age—and the first stars and galaxies were being born. Scientists believe that the two gal- axies may be merging, and that their rapid star formation is not only using up their gas, or star-forming fuel, but that it may eventually evolve the pair into massive elliptical galaxies like those seen in the Local Universe. “Using high-resolution ALMA obser- vations of molecular gas in the pair of galaxies known collectively as SPT0311-58 we detected both water and carbon monoxide molecules in the larger of the two galaxies. Oxy- gen and carbon, in particular, are first-generation elements, and in the molecular forms of carbon monoxide and water, they are critical to life as we know it,” said Sreevani Jarugula, an astronomer at the University of Illinois and the principal investigator on the new research. “This galaxy is the most massive galaxy currently known at high redshift, or the time when the Universe was still very young. It has more gas and dust compared to other galaxies in the early Universe, which gives us plenty of potential opportunities to ob- serve abundant molecules and to better understand how these life- creating elements impacted the de- velopment of the early Universe.” Water, in particular, is the third most abundant molecule in the Universe after molecular hydrogen and car- bon monoxide. Previous studies of galaxies in the local and early Uni- verse have correlated water emis- sion and the far-infrared emission from dust. “The dust absorbs the ul-