PRETORIA
A group of astronomers led by the University of Pretoria has discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever, referred to as a “space laser,” using South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) said Tuesday.
The newly discovered HATLAS J142935.3–002836 system, “the most distant and luminous known,” lies more than 8 billion light-years away in a merging galaxy, SARAO said in a statement.
The research facility said the system is located at such a vast distance that its observed form dates to when the universe was less than half its current age.
“In fact, it is so luminous that it warrants the classification gigamaser, instead of megamaser,” it said.
Hydroxyl megamasers, which SARAO described as natural “space lasers,” are produced when hydroxyl molecules in merging galaxies collide and amplify radio waves. They emit intense 18-centimeter wavelength signals visible across vast distances, with particularly bright emissions earning them the megamaser designation.
Thato Manamela, a SARAO-funded postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pretoria, said the radio waves are further amplified on their journey to Earth by a “perfectly aligned, yet unrelated” foreground galaxy.
“This galaxy acts as a lens, the way a water droplet on a window pane would, because its mass curves the local space-time. So we have a radio laser passing through a cosmic telescope before being detected by the powerful MeerKAT radio telescope,” he said.
Manamela emphasized that the discovery is “just the beginning.”
“We don’t want to find just one system – we want to find hundreds to thousands,” he added.
