Hubble can see further than ever before
Friday, 10 January, 2003, 22:09 GMT
Posted on 01/11/2003 5:10:48 PM PST by vannrox
Hubble can see further than ever before
Friday, 10 January, 2003, 22:09 GMT
The impressive Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has used a natural "gravitational lens" far off in space to boost its view of the distant Universe.
The image obtained by the HST offers an unprecedented and dramatic new view of the cosmos, promising to shed light on galaxy evolution and dark matter.
Though gravitational lensing has been studied previously, with Hubble and ground-based telescopes, this phenomenon has never been seen in such detail.
Astronomers will spend months studying the image. Interspersed with the foreground cluster are thousands of galaxies, which are lensed images of the galaxies in the background Universe.
A trillion stars
Hubble peered straight through the centre of one of the most massive known galaxy clusters, Abell 1689. Hubble observed the cluster, located more than 2.2 billion light- years away, for more than 13 hours.
The gravity of the cluster's trillion stars, plus its compliment of mysterious dark matter, acts as a two-million-light-year-wide "lens", bending and magnifying the light of the galaxies located even further away in space.
Although Abell 1689 has been observed by the HST before, the new ACS has revealed remote galaxies previously beyond even Hubble's reach.
Researchers believe that some of them may be twice as faint as those photographed in the Hubble Deep Field image, which previously pushed the telescope to its limits.
New calculations
Astronomers speculate that some of the faintest objects in the picture are over 13 billion light-years away.
In the image, hundreds of these distant galaxies are smeared by the gravitational bending of light into a spider-web tracing of blue and red arcs of light.
The position and extent of the distortion of the smeared galaxies will enable researchers to calculate the amount and the distribution of matter, both visible and dark, in the cluster.
By comparing the amount of estimated matter in the cluster with the amount that can be seen, astronomers hope to gain new information about what the dark matter could be.
That's great, but WE're never going to get there.
How can we see distant stars in a young Universe?
Starlight Wars: Starlight and Time withstands attacks
A plausible scientific solution to the distant starlight problem.
7-January-2003 The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has used a natural "zoom lens" in space to boost its view of the distant universe. Besides offering an unprecedented and dramatic new view of the cosmos, the results promise to shed light on galaxy evolution and dark matter in space. Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. For this observation, Hubble had to gaze at the distant cluster, located 2.2 billion light-years away, for more than 13 hours. The gravity of the cluster's trillion stars—plus dark matter—acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide "lens" in space. This "gravitational lens" bends and magnifies the light of galaxies located far behind it, distorting their shapes and creating multiple images of individual galaxies.
http://hubble.gsfc.nasa.gov/project-news/astronomy/2003-jan.html#faint_darkages
And, nine months later...
You rang?
I encountered immense difficulties and could not continue. Thank you for your contribution.(How can we see distant stars in a young Universe?) . . . Perhaps the most commonly used explanation is that God created light ‘on its way’, so that Adam could see the stars immediately without having to wait years for the light from even the closest ones to reach the earth. While we should not limit the power of God, this has some rather immense difficulties.
But the LIGHT reaches us in the Present Moment!
This moment is the first and the last step of Life's journey...no matter how far away a star's light may have begun, it's splendor travels with us now,
Tourist Guy will.
Einstein postulated that at 186,000 miles per second (the speed of light), it had to be pure light (energy) I don't think we're going to get there either.
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