ASTRONOMERS USE A GALAXY CLUSTER AS AN EXTREMELY POWERFUL NATURAL TELESCOPE TO PEER EVEN FARTHER I
ASTRONOMERS USE A GALAXY CLUSTER AS AN EXTREMELY POWERFUL “NATURAL TELESCOPE” TO PEER EVEN FARTHER INTO THE UNIVERSE
Article written: 4 Feb , 2018
by Matt Williams
When it comes to studying some of the most distant and oldest galaxies in the Universe, a number of challenges present themselves. In addition to being billions of light years away, these galaxies are often too faint to see clearly. Luckily, astronomers have come to rely on a technique known as Gravitational Lensing, where the gravitational force of a large object (like a galactic cluster) is used to enhance the light of these fainter galaxies.
Using this technique, an international team of astronomers recently discovered a distant and quiet galaxy that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Led by researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the team used the Hubble Space Telescope to conduct the most extreme case of gravitational lensing to date, which allowed them to observe the faint galaxy known as eMACSJ1341-QG-1.
The study that describes their findings recently appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters under the title “Thirty-fold: Extreme Gravitational Lensing of a Quiescent Galaxy at z = 1.6?. Led by Harald Ebeling, an astronomer from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the team included members from the Niels Bohr Institute, the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
For the sake of their study, the team relied on the massive galaxy cluster known as eMACSJ1341.9-2441 to magnify the light coming from eMACSJ1341-QG-1, a distant and fainter galaxy. In astronomical terms, this galaxy is an example of a “quiescent galaxy”, which are basically older galaxies that have largely depleted their supplies of dust and gas and therefore do not form new stars.
More:
https://www.universetoday.com/138477/astronomers-use-galaxy-cluster-extremely-powerful-natural-telescope-peer-even-farther-universe/
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