A Massive Cosmic Structure seen only 2 Billion Years after the Big Bang is Mapped by the AzTEC Camera (a Nature article on May 7, 2009)
A cluster of massive galaxies about 11.5 billion light years away is revealed by the AzTEC camera operating on a Japanese telescope
ASTE in northern Chile. This is the first concrete evidence of coherent cosmic structure consisting of massive galaxies and spanning tens of millions of light years at such an early epoch. Developed as the primary continuum imaging instrument for the LMT, the AzTEC camera has been operating on the ASTE telescope as a visiting instrument for two years (2007-2009), conducting large surveys of distant galaxies as well as star forming regions in the Milky Way galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. The discovery of the massive galaxy cluster in the early universe is described in the journal Nature by lead investigator Yoichi Tamura of the University of Tokyo and a team of international collaborators.
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(prepared by M. Yun)
