Fossil Galaxy Reveals Clues to Early Universe

The left hand panel shows a visible light image of Haro 11 acquired at the European Southern Observatories in Chile. North is up and East to the left. The image is 85 arcseconds on the side (114,000 light years at the distance of Haro 11; 1 arcsecond equals 1/3600 degrees). The right hand panel shows a false-color composite of the central part of the galaxy acquired with the Hubble Space Telescope. In this composite, a visible light image from the HST WFPC2 camera is coded in red, an ultraviolet light image from the HST ACS camera is coded in in green, and a spectral line emission image tracing neutral hydrogen (also from HST-ACS), excited by the kind of radiation detected by FUSE, is coded in blue. The ultraviolet light traces hot, young, stars, the visible light traces older, cooler, stars while the the line emission from hydrogen traces the interaction of energetic radiation with the gas in the galaxy. The size of the right hand image is 9.5 x 9.5 arcseconds, which at the distance of Haro 11 corresponds to 12,700 x 12,700 light years. The right hand panel is adapted from the paper by Kunth et al. 2003 in the Astrophysical Journal, Volume 597, page 266, and is reproduced by permission of the AAS.