August 1, 2014

1 min read

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Astronomers Use Gravitational Lenses to Push Hubble Past Its Limits

To learn how the universe evolved over time, a space telescope gazes back to the earliest galaxies ever observed

By Lee Billings

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In this hubble space telescope image, the galaxies of the giant cluster Abell 2744 appear strewn through space like jewels on black velvet. Their light began its journey to Earth some 3.5 billion years ago, when our biosphere was in its infancy. Despite appearances, the galaxies constitute less than 5 percent of the cluster's total mass, most of which resides in halos of invisible dark matter. There is, in fact, so much mass within this cluster that it behaves as a gravitational lens, warping space to magnify light from even deeper cosmic realms. The thousands of azure arcs and dots that surround the bright galaxies are actually distorted images of much fainter background galaxies, which were Hubble's true quarry in this image. We see them as they were more than 12 billion years ago, shortly after the big bang. They are some of the earliest galaxies ever glimpsed and offer a new window into galactic evolution, as well as a preview of what NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will routinely see after it launches later this decade.

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Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight and is senior desk editor for physical science at Scientific American. He is author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science and many other publications. Billings joined Scientific American in 2014 and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

More by Lee Billings
SA Special Editions Vol 23 Issue 3sThis article was published with the title “The Longest View” in SA Special Editions Vol. 23 No. 3s (), p. 112
doi:10.1038/scientificamericanuniverse0814-112
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