May 26, 2016 Tracy Vogel

The Whirlpool Galaxy Seen Through a Cosmic Lens

The Frontier Fields images, while beautiful, aren’t all that easy to comprehend to eyes outside the astronomy community. Look at them and you see streaks of light and blurry smudges mixed into a field of obvious galaxies. It can be difficult to interpret the distortions that occur as light from distant galaxies becomes magnified and bent by the vast mass of the Frontier Fields’ galactic clusters.

So here’s an interesting thought experiment. What if we could take a well-known galaxy and put it behind one of our Frontier Fields galaxy clusters? What would that look like?

Thanks to Dr. Rachael Livermore of the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Frank Summers of the Space Telescope Science Institute, you can see for yourself. In this video simulation, the Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51, sweeps behind the Frontier Fields galaxy cluster Abell 2744. As it moves, the gravity of the galaxy cluster distorts the light of the Whirlpool, warping and magnifying and even multiplying its image.

Obviously, this isn’t a realistic video — galaxies don’t just take jaunts through the cosmos. But it illustrates how our image of the Whirlpool would change depending on where it was placed behind the galaxy cluster. Livermore used the Whirlpool Galaxy for this video because it’s a well-known, popular Hubble image, easily recognizable through the distortions that happen at different locations in the lensing cluster.

Take a look. After the intro, the image on the left of the dotted line shows the location of the Whirlpool behind the cluster, while the image on the right shows the lensing distortion underway.

In this simulation, we’ve moved the Whirlpool to a distance astronomers refer to as redshift 2. That far back, it would be so distant that the light we’re seeing from it would have started traveling away from the galaxy when the universe was just a quarter of its current age. If the Whirlpool were that far away in real life, its light would take 10 billion years to reach Earth.

Note that this isn’t how the Whirlpool would really appear at that distance. At such a distance, all we would be able to make out is the vivid central bulge of stars. But for the purpose of this illustration, the whole galaxy has been kept artificially bright.

The most impressive distortions occur as the Whirlpool passes behind the center of the galaxy cluster, with multiple, stretched, distorted images of the galaxy appearing. At this point, the light of the Whirlpool beaming toward Earth bends to go around the cluster, but can go either left or right. There’s no preference, so some of it goes one way, and some goes another, and we get many images of the same galaxy.

This location is ideal for astronomers, because as you can see in this illustration, the images become both stretched and magnified, allowing the galaxy structure to be seen in greater detail. Furthermore, because a gravitational lens acts much as a telescope lens, more light is focused our way, making the galaxies brighter.

This, Livermore notes, is a primary reason why astronomers are interested in these galaxy clusters – the chance to see the distant background galaxies in so much greater detail than Hubble would be able to produce on its own.

June 23, 2015 Tracy Vogel

Galaxy Shapes in the Frontier Fields Observations

We can learn a lot about galaxies by analyzing their light, through computer modeling, and using other complex techniques. But at the most basic level, we can learn about galaxies by studying their shapes.

Galaxy appearance immediately reveals certain characteristics. Elliptical galaxies contain a wealth of old stars. Spiral galaxies are full of gas and dust. Distorted galaxies have likely experienced a gravitational interaction with another galaxy that warped their structure.

The Mice, as these colliding galaxies are called, are a pair of spiral galaxies seen about 160 million years after their closest encounter. Gravity has drawn stars and gas out of the galaxies into long tails. Credit: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA

The Mice, as these distorted colliding galaxies are called, are a pair of spiral galaxies seen about 160 million years after their closest encounter. Gravity has drawn stars and gas out of the galaxies into long tails. Credit: NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA

The Frontier Fields project adds another dimension to this simple analysis. When we look at extremely distant galaxies with the magnification of gravitational lensing, we see new detail that was previously obscured by distance. Their shapes are clues to what occurred within those galaxies when they were very young.

Galaxies viewed through the gravitational lenses of the Frontier Fields clusters can be seen at a resolution 10 times greater than non-lensed galaxies. That means those tiny red dots that so thrill astronomers in normal Hubble images actually have some structure in Frontier Fields imagery.

Previous studies, such as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey, or even adaptive optics-enhanced studies by ground telescopes have shown that young, star-forming galaxies at about a redshift of 2 (existing when the universe was about 3.3 billion years old) appear to have a certain lumpiness. But without gravitational lensing, we lack the resolution to say for sure whether those lumps were massive clusters of newly forming stars, or whether some other factor was causing those galaxies to have a clumpy appearance.

Frontier Fields has revealed that yes, many of those galaxies have star-forming knots that really are quite large, implying that star formation occurred in a very different way in the early universe, perhaps involving greater quantities of gas in those young galaxies than previously expected.

Frontier Fields has also given us a better grasp of the physical size of gravitationally lensed young galaxies even farther away, at a redshift of 9 (when the universe was around 500 million years old). Observations show that these galaxies are actually quite small – perhaps 200 parsecs across, while a typical galaxy you see today is closer to 10,000 parsecs across. These observations help plan future observations with the Webb Space Telescope, picking out what will hopefully be the best targets for study.

This composite image shows examples of galaxies similar to our Milky Way at various stages of construction over a time span of 11 billion years. The galaxies are arranged according to time. Those on the left reside nearby; those at far right existed when the cosmos was about 2 billion years old. The Frontier Fields project is collecting galaxies from the earliest epochs of the universe to add to such comparisons. Credit: NASA, ESA, P. van Dokkum (Yale University), S. Patel (Leiden University), and the 3D-HST Team

Galaxy shape also plays a role in discoveries in the Frontier Fields’ six parallel fields, which are unaffected by gravitational lensing but provide a view into space almost as deep as Hubble’s famous Ultra Deep Field, with three times the area.

It’s well known that galaxies collide and interact, drawn to one another by gravity. Most galaxies in the universe are thought to have gone through the merger process in the early universe, but the importance of this process is an open question. The transitional period during which galaxies are interacting and merging is relatively short, making it difficult to capture. A distant galaxy may appear clumpy and distorted, but is its appearance due to a merger – or is it just a clumpy galaxy?

Collision-related features — such as tails of stars and gas drawn out into space by gravity, or shells around elliptical galaxies that occur when stars get locked into certain orbits – are excellent indicators of merging galaxies but are hard to detect in distant galaxies with ordinary observations. Frontier Fields’ parallel fields are providing astronomers with a collection of faraway galaxies with these collision-related features, allowing astronomers to learn more about how these mergers affected the galaxies we see today.

As time goes on and the cluster and parallel Frontier Fields are explored in depth by astronomers, we expect to to learn much more about how galaxy evolution and galaxy shapes intertwine. New results are on the way.

February 17, 2015 Tracy Vogel

Celebrating Hubble’s 25th Anniversary

In April, Hubble will celebrate a quarter-century in space. The telescope, launched into orbit in 1990, has become one of NASA’s most beloved and successful missions, its images changing our understanding of the universe and taking root in our cultural landscape. Hubble pictures have not only expanded our scientific knowledge, they have altered the way we imagine the cosmos to appear.

Hubble took its iconic “Pillars of Creation” image of these star-forming clouds of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula in 1995. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University)

Hubble’s prolonged success has been a testament to its innovative design, which allowed it to be periodically updated by astronauts with new equipment and improved cameras. Hubble has been able, to an extent, to keep up with technological changes over the past 25 years. The benefits are evident when comparing the images of the past and present.

This new image of the Eagle Nebula’s “Pillars of Creation” was taken in 2014 to launch Hubble’s year-long celebration of its 25th anniversary. The image was captured with Wide Field Camera 3, an instrument installed on the telescope in 2009. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Hubble’s new instruments — specifically, the near-infrared capabilities of Wide Field Camera 3 — are what makes the Frontier Fields project possible. The faint infrared light of the most distant, gravitationally lensed galaxies sought in the Frontier Fields project would be beyond the reach of Hubble’s earlier cameras. Frontier Fields highlights Hubble’s continuing quest to blaze new trails in astronomy — and pave the path for the upcoming Webb Space Telescope — so it makes sense that its imagery is included in a collection of 25 of Hubble’s significant images, specially selected for the anniversary year.

The immense gravity in this foreground galaxy cluster, Abell 2744, warps space to brighten and magnify images of far-more-distant background galaxies as they looked over 12 billion years ago, not long after the big bang. This is the first of the Frontier Fields to be imaged.

Abell 2744, the first of the Frontier Fields to be imaged, is part of Hubble’s 25th anniversary collection of top images. The immense gravity of the foreground galaxy cluster warps space to brighten and magnify images of far-more-distant background galaxies. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer, and the HFF Team (STScI)

The 25th birthday is a significant milestone, so Hubble is throwing a year-long celebration, with events happening in communities and online throughout 2015. Last week, Tony Darnell hosted a discussion of the beauty and scientific relevance of the Hubble 25th anniversary images, one of the many anniversary-themed Hubble Hangouts he’ll be doing as the months go on. To keep an eye on upcoming events, see the images, and learn about the science, visit our special 25th anniversary website, Hubble25th.org.

January 21, 2015 Tracy Vogel

MACS J0416 Data is Complete

Observations of another Frontier Fields galaxy cluster and parallel field are complete. This time, we have new images for you of MACS J0416.1-2403. Here’s the galaxy cluster:

And here is the parallel field:

Beautiful, aren’t they? This is the second Frontier Fields cluster and parallel field to be fully imaged. You can see the first here.

Remember that to maximize scientific discovery, Hubble is using two of its instruments simultaneously to examine both the cluster and the parallel field, then observing the same areas again with the instruments switched.

Hubble takes two sets of observations, called epochs, in order to thoroughly examine the two areas. During the first, Hubble spent 80 orbits with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) pointing at the main galaxy cluster, and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) looking at the parallel field. ACS provides a visible-light view, and WFC3 adds near-infrared light.

During the second epoch, Hubble spent 70 orbits targeting WFC3 on the main cluster and ACS on the parallel field.

Scientists are poring over the new data, and one result is already in. Expect to hear more about these observations in the near future.

December 9, 2014 Tracy Vogel

Mapping Mass in a Frontier Fields Cluster

The Frontier Fields project’s examination of galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1-2403 has led to a precise map that shows both the amount and distribution of matter in the cluster. MACS J0416.1-2403 has 160 trillion times the mass of the Sun in an area over 650,000 light-years across.

The mass maps have a two-fold purpose: they identify the location of mass in the galaxy clusters, and by doing so make it easier to characterize lensed background galaxies.

Mass map of galaxy cluster MCS J0416.1–2403

The galaxy clusters under observation in Frontier Fields are so dense in mass that their gravity distorts and bends the light from the more-distant galaxies behind them, creating the magnifying effect known as gravitational lensing. Astronomers use the lensing effect to determine the location of concentrations of mass in the cluster, depicted here as a blue haze. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, HST Frontier Fields

Astronomers use the distortions of light caused by mass concentrations to pinpoint the distribution of mass within the cluster, including invisible dark matter. Weakly lensed background galaxies, visible in the outskirts of the cluster where less mass accumulates, may be stretched into slightly more elliptical shapes or transformed into smears of light. Strongly lensed galaxies, visible in the inner core of the cluster where greater concentrations of mass occur, can appear as sweeping arcs or rings, or even appear multiple times throughout the image. And as a dual benefit, as the clusters’ mass maps improve, it becomes easier to identify which galaxies are strongly lensed, and which galaxies are farther away.

Stronger lensing produces greater distortions. Astronomers can work backwards from the distortions to pinpoint the greater concentrations of mass responsible for producing such altered images. Credit: A. Feild (STScI)

The depth of the Frontier Fields images allows astronomers to see extremely faint objects, including many more strongly lensed galaxies than seen in previous observations of the cluster. Hubble identified 51 new multiply imaged galaxies around this cluster, for instance, quadrupling the number found in previous surveys. Because the galaxies are multiples, that means almost 200 strongly lensed images appear in the new observations, allowing astronomers to produce a highly constrained map of the cluster’s mass, inclusive of both visible and dark matter.

The dark matter aspect is particularly intriguing. Because these types of Frontier Fields analyses create extremely precise maps of the locations of dark matter, they provide the potential for testing the nature of dark matter. Learning where dark matter concentrates in massive galaxy clusters can give clues to how it behaves and changes. And as the mass maps become more precise, astronomers are better able to determine the distance of the lensed galaxies.

In order to obtain a complete picture of MACS J0416.1-2403’s mass, astronomers will also need to include weak lensing measurements. Follow up observations will include further Frontier Fields imaging, as well as X-ray measurements of hot gas and spectroscopic redshifts to break down the total mass distribution into dark matter, gas, and stars.

December 2, 2014 Tracy Vogel

Frontier Fields Finds Faint Light of Homeless Stars

The Frontier Fields’ project has detected the glow of about 200 billion freely drifting stars within the massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The stars were dragged from their home galaxies by gravitational tides during collisions and interactions over the course of 6 billion years.

As many as six Milky Way-sized galaxies were torn apart in the cluster. The light of the outcast stars is believed to contribute to 10 percent of the cluster’s brightness, though that light is quite faint because the density of the stars is low. The combination of depth and multiwavelength observations provided by the Frontier Fields program makes this study of such dim stars possible.

The total starlight of galaxy cluster Abell 2744 is depicted here in blue in this Frontier Fields image. Not all the starlight is contained within the galaxies, which appear as blue-white objects. A portion of the light comes from stars that have been pulled from their galaxies and now drift untethered within the cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Montes (IAC), and J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer, and the HFF Team (STScI)

The stars are rich in heavy elements such as oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, which means they formed from material released by earlier generations of stars. The presence of these elements indicates that the stars likely came from galaxies with similar mass and metallicity to our own Milky Way galaxy, which have the ability to sustain ongoing star formation and thus build populations of such chemically enriched stars. Elliptical galaxies are low in star formation while dwarf galaxies lack the kind of constant star formation that would be essential.

This discovery indicates that a significant fraction of the stars that would otherwise end up in these galaxies is being stripped out in the merger process. Astronomers intend to look for the light of such estranged stars in the remainder of the Frontier Fields galaxy clusters.

July 9, 2014 Tracy Vogel

Seeing Double (or More!) in Frontier Fields Images

Galaxy cluster Abell 2744, the first of the Frontier Fields to be imaged.

Take a long look at this image. You’re seeing a lot of distant galaxies magnified by the natural “gravitational lens” of galaxy cluster Abell 2744. But you aren’t seeing as many as you think.

Gravitational lenses, natural magnifiers created in space when light is bent by the enormous mass of galaxy clusters, distort and enlarge the images of distant galaxies behind the cluster. But they do more than that: sometimes they replicate them, like multiple images in a funhouse mirror.

Galaxy cluster Abell 2744, with multiple images of individual galaxies marked. These multiple images are produced by the cluster’s gravitational lens.

In the above image, we’ve marked the galaxies that are actually images of the same galaxy by overlaying them with numbered triangles. Each galaxy has a number. The multiple images are identified by letters. The galaxies labeled 1a, 1b, and 1 c, for instance, are one galaxy, its image repeated three times. (Only numbers and letters are significant. The colors don’t represent anything, but are used to make it easier to distinguish the various numbered galaxies.)

In previous posts, we explained that mass distorts space. Light from a distant galaxy follows space’s curve like a ball rolling along a putting green. (Think of space as a miniature golf course with fewer animatronic dinosaurs.)

Sometimes, the level of distortion sends the light to multiple places. If you’ve ever seen a single candle reflected multiple times in the bottom of a wineglass, you’ve seen this distorting effect occur in lenses. In fact, gravitational lensing is so similar to glass lensing that you could replicate the distortions of a gravitational lens by grinding a glass lens to the same proportions and bumps.

And cosmic lenses are quite lumpy. The galaxies of the cluster, embedded in halos of dark matter, create bumps of mass. Light can take multiple paths around the galaxy cluster as it encounters the distortions in space-time created by the cluster’s mass. The closer the light of more-distant galaxies passes to the lens, the stronger the deflection. If the light passes close enough to the lens, these multiple images are likely to appear. The individual galaxies in the cluster also add small deflections, and occasionally help produce multiple paths for the light to reach us.

When astronomers look at a lensed image, they’re looking at a giant puzzle. They need to figure out where all the mass is in the image – most of it, being dark matter, is invisible. Pinpointing the multiple images of identical galaxies helps accomplish this because they’re a good indicator of how dramatically the light is being deflected.

Some of the multiple images are obvious. Galaxy images 1a, 1b and 1c (left image) are good examples – they’re blue galaxies with red centers, and they look very like one another. The green-hued galaxy identified by 3a, 3b and 3c (right image) is another good example. Astronomers seek out those obvious candidates to start with, then try to build a model of how the mass in the cluster is distributed. Based on that model, they start identifying the multiple images that aren’t so obvious: Does this reddish galaxy to the side have a counterpart where the model says it should be? Analysis of attributes like color, and especially distance, also play an important role in determining which galaxies are multiples — a technique that comes in handy in many situations.

Thanks to reader Judy Schmidt for the idea for this post.

May 13, 2014 Tracy Vogel

Frontier Fields Q&A: Redshift and Looking Back in Time

Q: What do you mean when you say you’re “seeing some of the earliest galaxies in the universe?” How does looking into deep space allow you to look back in time?

The simple answer is that light travels and the universe is huge. Light travels very fast – 186,000 miles (300,000 km) per second, but it still has to move across the vast distances of space. Remember that for us to see anything – from the flash of a camera to the glow of a really distant galaxy, we have to wait for its light to strike our eyes.

That camera flash shows in our vision instantaneously because it doesn’t have far to go. But distances in the cosmos are so vast that it takes light a long time to reach us. The light from our closest companion, the Moon, takes about 1.3 seconds to cross the 239,000 miles (390,000 km) between us. So when you look up at the sky, you don’t see the Moon as it currently is. You see it as it appeared 1.3 seconds ago.

This is so 1.3 seconds ago.
Credit: Luc Viatour, Wikimedia Commons

The greater the distances, the greater the time difference. Light from the Sun needs about 500 seconds, or about eight minutes, to reach us from 93,200 miles (150 million km) away. Light from Neptune needs about four hours to cross the solar system.

We refer to these distances by the time it takes light to cross them. So Neptune is four light-hours away, and the Sun is 500 light-seconds away. Light from the next nearest star, however, needs four years to reach us across space. We say that star is four light-years away. The light we see from that star in today’s sky is also four years old. For galaxies, we’re talking millions to billions of light years. So we see the farthest galaxies as they appeared in the early universe, because the light that left them way back then is finally reaching us just now.

Q: What does it mean when you talk about a galaxy’s redshift?

When we’re discussing the Frontier Fields project, we’re talking about something more precisely called “cosmological redshift.” The space light is traveling through is expanding. That means that the light wave gets stretched as it travels, like a spring being pulled into a different shape. This stretching shifts light into longer wavelengths.

Since red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, the light is said to be “redshifted.” Credit: NASA

The farthest galaxies in the universe would have originally emitted visible and ultraviolet light, but since that light has been stretched as it travels, those galaxies appear to us instead in the form of infrared light. Cosmological redshift refers to that change and the measure of that change.

Q: Why do we hear the Frontier Fields galaxies described in terms of redshift and light-years? Which is right?

They tell us different things. Light-years are a measurement of distance defined by the time it takes light to travel in a year. But distance is notoriously difficult to measure in astronomy.

Cosmological redshift is a direct measurement of the expansion of space. Astronomers describe galaxies in terms of their redshift because unlike distance, it’s a clear and definite value that’s relatively easy to measure without many errors.

Astronomers have different models of how the universe works, and they can plug the redshift into those models to get the distance to a galaxy – but the distance will differ depending on which model of the universe they use. The variations in those models include things like the shape of the universe, the rate at which it’s expanding, the amount of normal matter it contains, etc.

Astronomy is about figuring out how the universe works and narrowing down all those models to the best one, and we still have a long way to go. Projects like Frontier Fields will help us rule out those models that don’t fit the incoming data.

Q: Everywhere we look with the Frontier Fields project, galaxies appear to be moving away from us. Does this mean we’re in the center of the universe?

No. It’s evidence that space is expanding. The easiest way to visualize this is to imagine a balloon. If you cover the balloon with dots, and then inflate it, no matter which dot you pick to represent your position, all the other dots will appear to be moving away from it as the balloon expands. Imagine this happening in three dimensions instead of on a flat surface, and you can understand why it looks like other galaxies are rushing away.

Q: So space is expanding and the light from the earliest galaxies has traveled over 13 billion years to reach us. If space is expanding, are those galaxies even farther away now?

Yes. For nearby galaxies, the expansion doesn’t make much of a difference. But for galaxies extremely far away, the distance is significant. That’s because the farther away an object is, the more space there is between us and the object. That in turn means there’s more space to undergo expansion, so the objects appear to be moving away from us much faster. Light from the earliest galaxies may have traveled 13 billion years to reach us, but those galaxies could be around 45 billion light-years distant by now.

Q: Does this mean the galaxies are moving faster than the speed of light?

No. No object can travel through space faster than the speed of light. But the expansion of space itself is not so constrained – in fact, theories of the beginning of the universe visualize the initial expansion of the Big Bang happening with unthinkable speed. But because the speed of light is only so fast, there are galaxies in the distance whose light we cannot yet see. We call this the edge of the visible universe.

Q: What’s out there, past the edge?

Space dragons! Ok, probably not. Credit: Uranometria

DRAGONS! SPACE DRAGONS! GIANT, COSMIC FIRE-BREATHING SPACE DRA– Ok, fine, probably not. Credit: Uranometria, Wikimedia Commons

We expect more of the same, though this is still an open question that astronomers are researching and theorizing about. We’ve found we tend to see the same distribution of galaxies no matter which direction we look in the universe. If we were somehow transported to a galaxy on what, for Earth, is the edge of the visible universe, the border of the visible universe would move, but the universe would neither change nor look very different to us.

Q: Do you have a question about the Frontier Fields project?

Leave it in comments, and we’ll see if we can answer it.

April 28, 2014 Tracy Vogel

What’s Really in a Frontier Fields Image?

What are we actually seeing when we look at one of the Frontier Fields images? The gravitational lensing that produces the strange, almost artistic-looking effects in the images — the streaks and blobs of light among glowing galaxies – is visually striking, but little of it falls into typical expectations of what we see when we look into the universe.

Archival image of the Abell 2744 cluster taken with Hubble’s visible light ACS instrument.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Dupke (Eureka Scientific, Inc.), et al.

Let’s break it down by examining this image of galaxy cluster Abell 2744, also known as Pandora’s Cluster. Four separate galaxy clusters containing several hundred galaxies are colliding in this image, providing the vast amount of mass — both normal and, most importantly, dark matter — needed to create a gravitational lens. The galaxies’ mass warps space and brightens, distorts and magnifies the light of nearly 3,000 galaxies located much farther away, behind the cluster.

For simplicity’s sake we’ve highlighted a representative sample of objects in the image. The highlighting therefore doesn’t capture every single object — just a handful of good examples.

Stars

In this image, the white circles enclose stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. The stars have a distinctive cross-shape created by light reflecting off the struts in the telescope. We call these diffraction spikes. These spikes only occur with bright, point-like objects, such as relatively nearby stars.

Foreground Galaxies

The green circles here capture galaxies that reside in the space between us and the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster. These galaxies are not affected by the gravitational lens – only galaxies behind the cluster are distorted and magnified. If you look at them, you see that their shapes are generally sharp, distinctive and recognizable. There aren’t many of these galaxies – the Frontier Fields project deliberately sought out galaxy clusters that didn’t have a lot of other objects in the way of Hubble’s view.

Cluster Galaxies

The yellow circles enclose the galaxies of the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster. These galaxies vary a lot in size, from dwarf galaxies a thousandth of the mass of our Milky Way to monster-sized central galaxies up to 100 times more massive than the Milky Way. Since the clusters are colliding, these galaxies are interacting with one another – each galaxy’s gravity is affecting the other galaxies, though the galaxies that are closest to one another affect each other more strongly. Some galaxies contain greater concentrations of mass than others, and thus have stronger gravitational effects – and make for stronger gravitational lenses.

As we go on, you’ll see that some of the lensed galaxies in this image appear less or more warped than others. This is because the distribution of the cluster’s mass is uneven, and thus the bending of space-time is uneven. Think of it as looking at objects at the bottom of a lake – the surface of the water is uneven, so some of the objects are more distorted than others.

As a side note, astronomers can actually study the distortion created by gravitational lensing to get an idea of how mass – both visible matter and the invisible dark matter — is distributed within the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster.

Strongly Lensed Galaxies

Now you’re seeing galaxies that are behind Abell 2744, and affected by the cluster’s gravitational lens. The light of these blue-circled galaxies is shining through the cluster, and is clearly distorted in many cases. In fact, many of these galaxies look like lines, streaks and arcs. They’re often concentrated along the same lines, and many of them have similar color schemes – blue with red patches.

Some of these objects are actually the exact same galaxy, because the gravitational lens breaks the image up, as though we were looking through a very strangely shaped piece of glass. This brings us to …

Weakly Lensed Galaxies

These magenta-circled objects are galaxies that are still behind the gravitational lens, but are not strongly distorted. You see distinctive galaxy shapes, like spirals. Their light is still being magnified and brightened, but they fall in an area where the bumpy pane of glass in our earlier metaphor is smooth. They are not as magnified as the strongly lensed galaxies.

Distant Galaxies

The tiny red specks circled here don’t look like much, but they’re actually some of the most intriguing objects in the image. These are the farthest and faintest of the galaxies being magnified by the gravitational lens. Their light could be reaching us from so far away that we see them as they appeared in the early universe – as far back as just millions of years after the Big Bang. (In a universe that’s 13.7 billion years old, that’s extremely far indeed.) One of these objects, Abell2744_Y1, is a candidate for being the most distant galaxy discovered in this image.

February 27, 2014 Tracy Vogel

Galaxy Find Showcases Frontier Fields’ Potential

A faraway object in Frontier Fields cluster Abell 2744 could be one of the most distant galaxies found to date, according to an international team studying a combination of Hubble and Spitzer data on the cluster.

The galaxy, called Abell2744_Y1, is about 30 times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy but is producing at least 8 times more stars. Further observations are needed to verify the galaxy’s redshift, which will help determine how truly distant it is. The highest-redshift galaxies, with values greater than 8 or 9, are so distant we see them as they were about 13 billion years ago. For comparison, galaxies with a redshift around 0 are in our local neighborhood and galaxies with a redshift of around 1 appear as they were halfway back to the Big Bang. Astronomers are hoping Abell2744_Y1 is in the high-redshift range.

Abell2744_Y1 (right) and its location in the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster (left). Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer, and the HFF Team (STScI), and N. Laporte (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias)

Though scientists are interested in galaxies with redshifts in the lower range, technological advances have made those discoveries far more routine. For many astronomers, the focus today is on galaxies with the higher redshifts. The difference is significant, since lower-redshift galaxies appear in our observations as they were billions of years after the Big Bang, but higher-redshift galaxies can show us the state of the universe just hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers can find these high-redshift objects with modern telescopes, but the ones they see tend to be the biggest, brightest galaxies of the early universe — the unusual objects, the outliers. To see the more normal objects — the typical galaxies of the time — astronomers use natural gravitational lenses in space to extend the reach of telescopes. And that’s where Frontier Fields comes in.

The Frontier Fields project will be looking at galaxy cluster Abell 2744 again in May, and using its natural lens to find more galaxies like Abell2744_Y1. The more ordinary, representative galaxies astronomers encounter, the better they can understand and explain the development of the early universe. Just as you couldn’t draw an accurate portrait of humanity by only examining the tallest people on the planet, scientists can’t build a complete picture of the universe when they can only detect its biggest and brightest galaxies. Astronomers need a large sample of everyday galaxies to learn what that population is really like.

Since 2006, the number of high-redshift galaxies known has increased from a dozen to 236, but only two have been confirmed as actually being high-redshift galaxies. To truly confirm the objects’ distances, astronomers need to obtain spectra of the galaxies. When Hubble looks at Abell 2744, it won’t be taking spectra of Abell2744_Y1, but the galaxy is bright enough to be detected by major ground-based telescopes, so it’s possible an Earth-based observatory may confirm its distance.

The small galaxy is producing stars at a rate of anywhere from eight to 60 solar masses per year, much more than the Milky Way’s star production rate of about one to three solar masses per year. A solar mass is the equivalent of our Sun’s mass. That number may not sound like much, but remember that stars develop over the course of millions of years, meaning that tiny galaxy is pumping out stars at a thoroughly respectable pace. Will other distant galaxies magnified by Abell 2744’s gravitational lens match its production? We’ll learn more as the Frontier Fields data begins to pour in.

Frontier Fields

Pushing the Limits of the Hubble Space Telescope