A research team led by graduate student Akiyoshi Tsujita of the Department of Astronomy, Graduate School of Science, the University of Tokyo, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array to observe a galaxy in the early Universe about 12.9 billion years ago and searched for fluorine. Despite deep observations, no signal was detected, providing a stringent upper limit on the fluorine abundance in the most distant Universe probed to date. This result challenges the conventional view that massive Wolf–Rayet stars were the dominant producers and suppliers of fluorine in the early Universe, and offers an important clue to the origin of fluorine and the physical processes inside stars.
FEBRUARY 27, 2026
Press Release
