2009/05/01 by Yoichi Tamura, Kotaro Kohno, Kouichiro Nakanishi +24
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nature07947
published as Nature 459, 61-63 (2009) · Published in Nature (7th May 2009 issue). The astro-ph paper includes the main text (10 pages, 2 figures, 1 table) and supplementary material (6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table)
openalex publication_date 2009/05/01 · arxiv created 2009/05/06 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Lyman-alpha emitters are thought to be young, low-mass galaxies with ages of ~108 yr. An overdensity of them in one region of the sky (the SSA 22 field) traces out a filamentary structure in the early Universe at a redshift of z = 3.1 (equivalent to 15 per cent of the age of the Universe) and is believed to mark a forming protocluster. Galaxies that are bright at (sub)millimetre wavelengths are undergoing violent episodes of star formation, and there is evidence that they are preferentially associated with high-redshift radio galaxies, so the question of whether they are also associated with the most significant large-scale structure growing at high redshift (as outlined by Lyman-alpha emitters) naturally arises. Here we report an imaging survey of 1,100-um emission in the SSA 22 region. We find an enhancement of submillimetre galaxies near the core of the protocluster, and a large-scale correlation between the submillimetre galaxies and the low-mass Lyman-alpha emitters, suggesting synchronous formation of the two very different types of star-forming galaxy within the same structure at high redshift. These results are in general agreement with our understanding of the formation of cosmic structure.