Best Art in the Universe

(Dec. 15) -- You might think that taking highly detailed photographs of the darkest corners of the universe would be a purely scientific job. Turns out, there's an art to it.

For the past 20 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been orbiting the planet and wowing earthlings with breathtaking images of outer space, from jaw-dropping pictures of clusters of newborn stars to fantastic photos of colliding galaxies.

But it's not just Hubble's cutting-edge optics that are responsible for these stunning photographs. Behind each image is the hard work of a team of researchers in Baltimore, who balance art and astronomy to capture out-of-this-world pictures that further our knowledge of outer space.

Galaxy cluster Abell 1689:

The yellow galaxies in this image belong to the cluster itself, however, the red and blue distorted streaks are background galaxies gravitationally lensed by the cluster. Some of the lensed galaxies are over 13 billion light years (4000 megaparsec) distant. The lensing zone itself is 2 million light years (0.60 megaparsec) across.

Sumpin' big's lurkin' in there.

Funny you should say that...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took advantage of a giant cosmic magnifying glass to create one of the sharpest and most detailed maps of dark matter in the universe. Dark matter is an invisible and unknown substance that makes up the bulk of the universe's mass.

The new dark matter observations may yield new insights into the role of dark energy in the universe's early formative years. The result suggests that galaxy clusters may have formed earlier than expected, before the push of dark energy inhibited their growth. A mysterious property of space, dark energy fights against the gravitational pull of dark matter. Dark energy pushes galaxies apart from one another by stretching the space between them, thereby suppressing the formation of giant structures called galaxy clusters. One way astronomers can probe this primeval tug-of-war is through mapping the distribution of dark matter in clusters.

A team led by Dan Coe at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to chart the invisible matter in the massive galaxy cluster Abell 1689, located 2.2 billion light-years away. The cluster's gravity, the majority of which comes from dark matter, acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, bending and amplifying the light from distant galaxies behind it. This effect, called gravitational lensing, produces multiple, warped, and greatly magnified images of those galaxies, like the view in a funhouse mirror. By studying the distorted images, astronomers estimated the amount of dark matter within the cluster. If the cluster's gravity only came from the visible galaxies, the lensing distortions would be much weaker.

Pictures like these are wonderful, but they have one (tiny) negative unintended consequence: they occasionally lead to disappointment when someone looks through an amateur (or even semi-pro) telescope for the first time.

They've grown up seeing pictures like this, and they expect to see something like that through the scope, and instead when they look at the Orion Nebula with their naked eye for the first time, their reaction is "But...it's just some green fuzz! Shouldn't it look like the Mutara Nebula in Star Trek II?"

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