A team of international researchers led by Shinya Komugi, assistant professor at the NAOJ ALMA Project Office and Tomoka Tosaki, associate professor at the Joetsu University of Education, successfully created a detailed wide-area distribution map of star-forming materials in Triangulum galaxy (M33), one of the nearest galaxies to ours, located 2.7 million light years away.

The research team spent more than 1000 hours for observations of molecular gas and cold dust in M33 with Nobeyama 45-m Radio Telescope in Nagano, Japan and 10-m ASTE Telescope at 4800 m asl in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Both the molecular gas and cold dust are the star-forming materials, and the most of the molecular gas is produced on the surface of the dust.

In this research, the distribution of molecular gas in M33 was observed at resolution 3 times higher than past observations, while cold dust was first mapped in this observation. The obtained detailed map will be a useful guide for future observations of M33 with ALMA at higher resolution.

The picture shows assistant professor Komugi giving a presentation at press conference. [Photographed by Masaaki Hiramatsu (NAOJ)]