Friday, October 3rd, 2008

Looking at Magnetic Fields in a Distant Galaxy

Image of galaxy hosting the unusually strong magnetic field. Credit H-W Chen (University of Chicago)

In this segment, we'll talk with one of the scientists behind a project that used a radio telescope to peer back millions of years in time and make observations of the magnetic field present in a distant proto-galaxy. Writing in the journal Nature this week, the team reported that the magnetic field they found in the distant spinning proto-galaxy, named DLA-3C286, was much stronger than they had anticipated. The strength of the field, they say, calls into question theories about the origin of the magnetic field and the processes by which galaxies form. The field observed in DLA-3C286 was over 10 times the average value.