Milky Way-type dust particles discovered in a galaxy 11 billion light years from Earth

An international research team, with participation from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, has found the same type of interstellar dust that we know from the Milky Way in a distant galaxy 11 billion light years from Earth. This type of dust has been found to be rare in other galaxies and the new discovery plays an important role in understanding what it takes for this particular type of interstellar dust to be formed.

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Credit: Niels Bohr Institute

The discovery of the afterglow. To the left is an image from the so-called Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii taken before the explosion. To the right is an image of the same part of the sky taken with the Nordic Optical Telescope a few minutes after the explosion was registered by the Swift satellite.

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Credit: Tayyaba Zafar (AAO) et al

Spectra of the afterglow from GRB 180325A taken with the NOT and the ESO/VLT X-shooter. The dust bump is seen as the downward bulge, which is in the spectrum around 7000 Å. For comparison, you can see the Milky Way dust bump in the small inset to the left.

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Swift's discoveries continue to push the cosmic frontier deeper back in time. A gamma-ray burst detected on Sept. 4, 2005, was shown to be lie 12.77 billion light-years away.

Until the new study dethroned it, GRB 090423, which was detected just six days before the current record-holder, reigned a distance of about 13.04 billion light-years. All of these gamma-ray bursts were among the first 500 detected by Swift.