{"id":217004,"date":"2025-07-02T10:05:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T15:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/alma-reveals-hidden-structures-in-the-first-galaxies-of-the-universe"},"modified":"2025-07-02T10:05:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T15:05:15","slug":"alma-reveals-hidden-structures-in-the-first-galaxies-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/alma-reveals-hidden-structures-in-the-first-galaxies-of-the-universe","title":{"rendered":"ALMA reveals hidden structures in the first galaxies of the universe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/alma-reveals-hidden-structures-in-the-first-galaxies-of-the-universe.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to peer into the early universe and uncover the building blocks of galaxies during their formative years. The CRISTAL survey\u2014short for [CII] Resolved ISM in STar-forming galaxies with ALMA\u2014reveals cold gas, dust, and clumpy star formation in galaxies observed as they appeared just 1 billion years after the Big Bang.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThanks to ALMA\u2019s unique sensitivity and resolution, we can resolve the internal structure of these early <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/galaxies\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">galaxies<\/a> in ways never possible before,\u201d said Rodrigo Herrera-Camus, principal investigator of the CRISTAL survey, professor at Universidad de Concepci\u00f3n, and Director of the Millennium Nucleus for Galaxy Formation (MINGAL) in Chile. \u201cCRISTAL is showing us how the first galactic disks formed, how stars emerged in giant clumps, and how gas shaped the galaxies we see today.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>CRISTAL, an ALMA Large Program, observed 39 typical star-forming galaxies selected to represent the main population of galaxies in the early universe. Using [CII] line emission, a specific type of light emitted by ionized <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/carbon+atoms\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">carbon atoms<\/a> in cold interstellar gas, as a tracer of <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/cold+gas\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">cold gas<\/a> and dust, and combining it with near-infrared images from the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes, researchers created a detailed map of the interstellar medium in each system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to peer into the early universe and uncover the building blocks of galaxies during their formative years. The CRISTAL survey\u2014short for [CII] Resolved ISM in STar-forming galaxies with ALMA\u2014reveals cold gas, dust, and clumpy star formation in galaxies observed as they appeared just 1 billion years [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}