New telescope reveals early star formation

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, was opened this week.  ALMA is a large array of radio telescopes in the Chilean desert that Canada helped to build, and which is designed to look at dust and gas at great distances in the universe. Before its official opening, however, ALMA has already been at work. Yasher Hezaveh, a PhD candidate in the astrophysics and cosmology group in the Department of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, and his colleagues, have looked far out in space and back in time to observe early galaxies in the universe.  Stars were being born at a fantastic rate in these early galaxies, in a stellar baby boom.