SYDNEY, April 8 (Xinhua) -- A team of Australian and international researchers have discovered a mega laser being beamed 5 billion light years from Earth, which could hold secrets about the formation of early galaxies.
The discovery, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and released to the public on Thursday night, was of the most distant galactic laser ever to be detected through radio telescopes.
Marcin Glowacki from Curtin University's International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and lead researcher on the project, told Xinhua that unlike traditional laser beams the "megamaser" is made of wavelengths outside the visible light spectrum.
"So, it's just a laser in a different wavelength. And the "mega" part is because it is a really big one and is seen on the scale of galaxies," Glowacki said on Friday.
He said the laser was the result of the collision between two galaxies as they had merged together around 5 billion years ago - before the formation of the Earth.
"When galaxies collide, the gas they contain becomes extremely dense and can trigger concentrated beams of light to shoot out," he said.
Glowacki said the discovery would aid our understanding of the evolution of galaxies in the universe's distant history.
The megamaser was discovered using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, after being trained on a single patch of the night sky for just one night.
"This was part of a project that is aiming to look at one patch of the sky for a very long time with a very sensitive telescope," and the whole survey would last a total of 3,000 hours.
Glowacki said the team would follow up the discovery with a closer inspection of the source of the megamaser using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Array radio telescope in the United States.
"It's quite encouraging on the amount of discoveries we can potentially make and this is just with one project."
The scientists gave the newly discovered megamaser the name "Nkalakatha," which means "big boss" in isiZulu, a local language in South Africa, and was chosen through a competition by local university students. ■
