Astronomers have made use of ESO's Very Large Telescope to detect for the first time in the ultraviolet the carbon monoxide molecule in a galaxy located almost 11 billion light-years away, a feat that had remained elusive for 25 years. This detection allows them to obtain the most precise measurement of the cosmic temperature at such a remote epoch.
The team of astronomers [1] aimed the UVES spectrograph on ESO's VLT for more than 8 hours at a well-hidden galaxy whose light has taken almost 11 billion years to reach us, that is about 80% of the age of the Universe.
Quasars are here only used as a beacon in the very distant Universe. Interstellar clouds of gas in galaxies, located between the quasars and us on the same line of sight, absorb parts of the light emitted by the quasars. The resulting spectrum consequently presents dark 'valleys' that can be attributed to well-known elements and possibly molecules
clipped from: www.sciencedaily.com 