Videos/Visualizations

September 28, 2016

Beyond the Frontier Fields: How JWST Will Push the Science to a New Frontier

The Frontier Fields Project has been an ambitious campaign to see deep into our universe. Gravitational lensing, as used by the Frontier Fields Project, enables Hubble to see fainter and more-distant galaxies than would otherwise be possible. These images push to the very limits of how deeply Hubble can see out into space.

Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, and other observatories are doing cutting-edge science through the Frontier Fields Project, but there’s a challenge. Even though leveraging gravitational lensing has allowed astronomers to see objects that otherwise could not be detected with today’s telescopes, the technique still isn’t enough to see the most distant galaxies. As the universe expands, light gets stretched into longer and longer wavelengths, beyond the visible and near-infrared wavelengths Hubble can detect. To see the most distant galaxies, one needs a space telescope with Hubble’s keen resolution, but at infrared wavelengths.

That infrared telescope is the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in October 2018. It has a mirror 6.5 meters (21 feet) across, can observe wavelengths up to 10 times longer than Hubble can observe, and is the mission that will detect and study the first appearances of galaxies in the universe.full_jwst_hst_mirror_comparison

Figure 1: Webb will have a 6.5-meter-diameter primary mirror, which would give it a significant larger collecting area than the mirrors available on the current generation of space telescopes. Hubble’s mirror is a much smaller 2.4 meters in diameter, and its corresponding collecting area is 4.5 square meters, giving Webb around seven times more collecting area! Webb’s field of view is more than 15 times larger than the NICMOS near-infrared camera on Hubble. It also will have significantly better spatial resolution than is available with the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA. http://webbtelescope.org/gallery

Observations of the early universe are still incomplete. To build the full cosmological history of our universe, we need to see how the first stars and galaxies formed, and how those galaxies evolved into the grand structures we see today.

 

Looking back in time to the first light in the universe:

Astronomers use light to explore the universe, but there are pieces of our universe’s early history where there wasn’t much light. The era of the universe called the “Dark Ages” is as mysterious as its name implies. Shortly after the Big Bang, our universe was filled with glowing plasma, or ionized gas. As the universe cooled and expanded, electrons and protons began to bind together to form neutral hydrogen atoms (one proton and one electron each). The last of the light from the Big Bang escaped (becoming what we now detect as the Cosmic Microwave Background). The universe would have been a dark place, with no sources of light to reveal this cooling, neutral hydrogen gas.

Some of that gas would have begun coalescing into dense clumps, pulled together by gravity. As these clumps grew larger, they would become stars and eventually galaxies. Slowly, starlight would begin to shine in the universe. Eventually, as the early stars grew in numbers and brightness, they would have emitted enough ultraviolet light to “reionize” the universe by stripping electrons off neutral hydrogen atoms, leaving behind individual protons. This process created a hot plasma of free electrons and protons. At this point, the light from star and galaxy formation could travel freely across space and illuminate the universe. It is important to note here, astronomers are currently unsure whether the energy responsible for reionization came from stars in the early-forming galaxies; rather, it might have come from hot gas surrounding massive black holes or some even more exotic source such as decaying dark matter.

The universe’s first stars, believed to be 30 to 300 times as massive as our Sun and millions of times as bright, would have burned for only a few million years before dying in tremendous explosions, or “supernovae.” These explosions spewed the recently manufactured chemical elements of stars outward into the universe before the expiring stars collapsed into black holes.

Astronomers know the universe became reionized because when they look back at quasars — incredibly bright objects thought to be powered by supermassive black holes — in the distant universe, they don’t see the dimming of their light that would occur if the light passed through a fog of neutral hydrogen gas. While they find clouds of neutral hydrogen gas, they see almost no signs of neutral hydrogen gas in the matter located in the space between galaxies. This means that at some point the matter was reionized. Exactly when this occurred is one of the questions Webb will help answer, by looking for glimpses of very distant objects still dimmed by neutral hydrogen gas.

Much remains to be uncovered about the time of reionization. The universe right after the Big Bang would have consisted of hydrogen, helium, and a small amount of lithium. But the stars we see today also contain heavier elements — elements that are created inside stars. So how did those first stars form from such limited ingredients? Webb may not be able to see the very first stars of the Dark Ages, but it’ll witness the generation of stars immediately following, and analyze the kinds of materials they contain.

Webb’s ability to see the infrared light from the most distant objects in the universe will allow it to truly identify the sources that gave rise to reionization. For the first time, we will be able to see the stars and quasars that unleashed enough energy to illuminate the universe again.

9682953582_7029d9580d_b

Figure 2: JWST will be able to see back to when the first bright objects (stars and galaxies) were forming in the early universe. Credit: STScI. http://jwst.nasa.gov/firstlight.html

 

Early Galaxies:

Webb will also show us how early galaxies formed from those first clumps of stars. Scientists suspect the black holes born from the explosions of the earliest stars (supernovae) devoured gas and stars around them, becoming the extremely bright objects called “mini-quasars.” The mini-quasars, in turn, may have grown and merged to become the huge black holes found in the centers of present-day galaxies. Webb will try to find and understand these supernovae and mini-quasars to put theories of early galaxy formation to the test. Do all early galaxies have these mini-quasars or only some? These regions give off infrared light as the gas around them cools, allowing Webb to glean information about how mini-quasars in the early universe work — how hot they are, for instance, and how dense.

Webb will show us whether the first galaxies formed along lines and webs of dark matter, as expected, and when. Right now we know the first galaxies formed anywhere from 378,000 years to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Many models have been created to explain which era gave rise to galaxies, but Webb will pinpoint the precise time period.

Hubble is known for its deep-field images, which capture slices of the universe throughout time. But these images stop at the point beyond which Hubble’s vision cannot reach. Webb will fill in the gaps in these images, extending them back to the Dark Ages. Working together, Hubble and Webb will help us visualize much more of the universe than we ever have before, creating for us an unprecedented picture that stretches from the current day to the beginning of the recognizable universe.

th-webb-telescope-artist-view5_2x__1_

Figure 3: This illustration shows the cold side of the Webb telescope, where the mirrors and instruments are positioned. Credit: Northrop Grumman. http://webbtelescope.org/gallery

 

Resources:

https://frontierfields.org/2016/07/21/the-final-frontier-of-the-universe/

http://hubble25th.org/science/8

http://webbtelescope.org/article/13

May 26, 2016

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.

 

 

 

 

 

November 12, 2015 Video

‘Hubble’s Views of the Deep Universe’ – Public Lecture

On November 3, 2015, I gave a presentation called “Hubble’s Views of the Deep Universe”.  This presentation was to commemorate some of Hubble’s most influential observing campaigns during this 25th anniversary year.  Of course, I could not get to all of Hubble’s programs that observed the deep universe in just an hour.  For additional information, check out the science articles on the Hubble 25th website and, of course, keep checking back to this blog.

Dr. Brandon Lawton
“Hubble’s Views of the Deep Universe”

November 3, 2015

For two decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has pioneered the exploration of the distant universe with images known as the “deep fields”. These deep fields have given astronomers unprecedented access to understanding how galaxies form and develop over billions of years in the history of our universe, from shortly after the Big Bang to today. Join us for a retrospective view of Hubble’s contributions to the investigation of the deep reaches of the cosmos and some fresh glimpses of what Hubble is currently doing to further our understanding of the most distant parts of the universe.

This lecture is part of the monthly public lecture series at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Each month addresses a different cosmic topic, usually related to Hubble, but always venturing to some fascinating part of the universe. For more information, check out the web page on HubbleSite:
http://hubblesite.org/about_us/public_talks/

September 28, 2015

New Interactive Explorer for Galaxy Cluster Abell 2744

The high-resolution images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope for the Frontier Fields survey have yielded a treasure trove of insights into very distant galaxy clusters.  In addition to providing astronomers with unparalleled views of galaxies that Hubble would not otherwise be able to see, the high-resolution images are providing views of distant corners of the universe that are similar to the famous Hubble Deep Fields.

To give you some idea of just how detailed and rich the Frontier Field images are, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute has created this interactive viewer to explore them yourself:

Click here to explore the Abell 2744 yourself:

Abell 2744 Viewer

To help you use and navigate the viewer, we’ve created a short video to help familiarize you with the interface and controls.  Over time, we’ll be adding more of the Frontier Fields clusters, so be sure to check back for updates.

May 20, 2015

The Incredible Time Machine

Today’s guest post is by Mary Estacion. Mary is the News Video Producer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. She is also the host and producer of the “Behind the Webb” podcast series, which showcases the James Webb Space Telescope as it is being built as well as the engineers and scientists working on the observatory. The video in this post highlights a topic of particular interest to the Frontier Fields project — deep field astronomy.

The production of the “The Incredible Time Machine” video is part of a year-long celebration highlighting 25 years of the Hubble Space Telescope. Because of Hubble, we can see back to hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. This particular segment includes more than a half a dozen scientists from all over the country who have used Hubble to look at the universe’s earliest days. It takes you through the history of the Deep Field Program and shows how the addition of new instruments on Hubble throughout the years has furthered our understanding of the universe’s evolution.

For the video, go here:  http://hubble25th.org/video/5

February 26, 2015

The Marvel of Gravitational Lensing

A Giant Lensed Galaxy Arc

A Giant Lensed Galaxy Arc
The view of a distant galaxy (nearly 10 billion light-years away) has been warped into a nearly 90-degree arc of light by the gravity of the galaxy cluster known as RCS2 032727-132623 (about 5 billion light-years away).
Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Rigby (NASA GSFC), K. Sharon (KICP, U Chicago), and M. Gladders and E. Wuyts (U Chicago)

One of the coolest marvels in the universe is a phenomenon known as “gravitational lensing.” Unlike many topics in astronomy, the images are not what makes it appealing. Gravitational lensing produces streaks, arcs, and other distorted views that are intriguing, but don’t qualify for cosmic beauty pageants. What makes these images special is the intellectual understanding of how they are created, and the fact that they are even possible at all. The back story takes an ordinary, everyday process, and transforms it into cosmic proportions.

Most of us are familiar with the workings of a glass lens. If you have ever used a magnifying glass, you have seen how it changes the view of an object seen through it.

The glass lens collects light across its surface, which is generally much larger than the pupil of a human eye. Hence, a lens can amplify brightness. In addition, the path of a light ray is bent when it passes through the glass lens. [To be specific, the path bends when the light crosses from air to glass, and again when it crosses back from glass to air.] This bending is called refraction, and the common lens shape will focus the light to a point. When we view that collected light, our view of the object can be bigger or smaller depending on the distances involved, both from the object to the lens and from the lens to our eyes. In summary, a glass lens can amplify and magnify the light from an object.

Glass lenses, however, are not the only way that the path of light can be changed. Another way to redirect light comes from Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

My three-word summary of general relativity is “mass warps space.” The presence of a massive object, like a star, warps the space around it. When light crosses through warped space, it will change its direction. The result is that light that passes close enough to a massive object will be deflected. This deflection by mass is similar to refraction by glass.

Clusters of galaxies are huge concentrations of mass, including both the normal matter we see in the visible light from galaxies and the unseen dark matter spread throughout. Many galaxy clusters are massive enough to produce noticeable deflections of the light passing through or near them. The combined gravity in the cluster can warp space to act like a lens that gathers, amplifies, and magnifies light. Such a gravitational lens will be lumpy, not smooth, and will generally create distorted images of background galaxies seen through them. Also, this lensing often produces multiple images of the same background galaxy, as light from that galaxy is re-directed toward us along multiple paths through the cluster.

The simple idea of a glass lens becomes both cosmic and complex in gravitational lensing. Imagine a lens stretching millions of light-years across (many million million millions of miles). We don’t need to construct such a lens, as nature has provided a good number of them through the warping of the fabric of space. These lenses allow us to see very distant galaxies in the universe, some of which could not otherwise be observed. That’s the marvelous reality of galaxy clusters acting as gravitational lenses.

November 24, 2014

A Black Hole Visits Baltimore

[NOTE: This post is the fourth in a four-part series. Previous posts are: 1) Einstein’s Crazy Idea, 2) Visual “Proof” of Gravitational Lensing, and 3) Gravitational Lensing in Action.]

For the final part of this series of blog posts, let’s bring things back to Earth. The demonstration of a physical process will always seem a bit arcane when using unfamiliar objects as the example. Most folks don’t have a working relationship with galaxies, let alone the strange varieties one gets in the distant universe. Instead of taking the viewer into the universe, it can be more intuitive to bring the cosmic phenomenon closer to home.

Suppose that, say, a black hole decided to take a short vacation. Perhaps it got tired of the enormous responsibilities of being such a tremendous distortion of space-time. It needed a weekend off to cool its jets (absurdly geeky pun intended – sorry). Around Baltimore, where I work, the black hole might go down to the Inner Harbor, enjoy the sights and activities, indulge in a crab feast, and leave completely rejuvenated. Now, while I haven’t yet tried to visualize a black hole eating crabs, and the concomitant singularity eruptions due to Old Bay seasoning, we can approximate what tourists might have seen during the visit.

A Black Hole Visits Baltimore

Credit: Frank Summers (STScI), special thanks to Brian McLeod (Harvard).

This scientific visualization presents a black hole of about the mass of Saturn passing through Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The initial view from Federal Hill shows the usual boats, shops, and office buildings along the water. As the black hole passes across the harbor, the view of the background buildings is distorted due to gravitational lensing. Light is redirected such that, in the region around the singularity, imagery is flipped top/bottom and left/right, with multiple views of the same object. This transformation of a familiar skyline scene can help one imagine the transformation of unfamiliar galaxies in the distant universe.

Note: As in the previous simulated lensing image, a simplified, planar approach of gravitational lensing is used for this visualization. However, in this case, the foreground objects were not removed. The visual distortion of ship’s masts on the near side of the harbor would not occur. We humbly ask your indulgences.

While in graduate school, I had to solve problems using the complex collection of general relativity equations – but only a few times. And all of those instances were for problems with enough symmetry that things could be considerably simplified. I gained an appreciation for the essential character, and some of the beauty, of the mathematics behind it. However, as stated in the first post in this series, the whole concept still has a feeling of weirdness.

Perhaps that notion would have dissipated had I specialized in relativity. Instead, as I developed into a scientific visualization specialist, I’ve gotten to revisit things from a public presentation, rather than research, perspective. The visual allure of gravitational lensing can attract an audience for topics typically mired in equations. It shows how a simple magnifying glass can have a truly cosmic analogue. It helps explore the perspective changing shift in gravity from Newton’s force to Einstein’s geometric re-interpretation. It opens the pathway to deeper philosophical thoughts about the fabric of space-time and the very underpinnings of our universe. Now, that’s quite the opportunity for an outreach astrophysicist like me.

In this case, weird is cool.

August 27, 2014

Frontier Fields Public Lecture

Want to hear about the Frontier Fields project straight from the scientist? On August 5, 2014, principal investigator Dr. Jennifer Lotz gave a public lecture entitled “The Frontier Fields: a Sneak Peek at the First Billion Years of the Universe” and the recorded webcast is available at the link below.

Dr. Jennifer Lotz
The Frontier Fields: a Sneak Peek at the First Billion Years of the Universe

August 5, 2014

How we far can we go? What are the faintest objects the Hubble Space Telescope can possibly see? Can we get a sneak peek at the early universe before the James Webb Space Telescope is launched? These are the key questions we hope to answer with the Frontier Fields campaign. Over this three year program, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute will attempt to push the Hubble Space Telescope’s capabilities to its limits. This ambitious effort will combine the power of Hubble with the natural gravitational telescopes of massive clusters of galaxies that magnify more distant galaxies. Hubble will obtain the deepest ever optical and infrared images of six massive clusters, in parallel with the deep images of six neighboring “blank” fields. These observations will reveal galaxies about 10-20 times fainter than any previously seen, allowing astronomers to study the birth of galaxies like our own Milky Way.

https://webcast.stsci.edu/webcast/detail.xhtml?talkid=4287

This lecture is part of the monthly public lecture series at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Each month addresses a different cosmic topic, usually related to Hubble, but always venturing to some fascinating part of the universe. For more information, check out the web page on HubbleSite:  http://hubblesite.org/about_us/public_talks/

 
May 13, 2014

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

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 "red-shifted." Credit: NASA

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.

January 30, 2014 Video

Frontier Fields in Two Minutes

The Frontier Fields project is an ambitious, multi-year cosmology research project using Hubble and many other telescopes. Describing the astronomy motivation, science concepts, planning, coordination, and execution is a long and daunting task. The Principal Investigator, Jennifer Lotz, recently gave a public-level presentation that was an hour long, with much of her discussion necessarily condensed.

Now, folks don’t always have that kind of time to spend learning about a new project. What about the short version: the so-called elevator pitch?

To address that need, we created a two-minute video overview of the Frontier Fields. We trimmed the astronomical story to its essentials, gathered and developed scientific visuals, and attempted to express it it all in just nine sentences.

The video below was part of our press release at the American Astronomical Society winter meeting in January 2014. It won’t make you a cosmology expert, but it will provide the essential character of one of the most important projects amongst Hubble’s current programs. I directed (and narrated) this video, and would welcome any comments or questions.

As for all those scientific details that we glossed over or skipped, well, that’s one of the main motivations of this blog. Stay tuned.

Frontier Fields: Exploring the Depths of the Universe

This video presents an overview of the Frontier Fields project. While Hubble has a celebrated history of deep field observations, astronomers can use massive galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses to see a little farther into space and a little further back in time. This ambitious, community-developed project is a collaboration among NASA’s Great Observatories to probe the earliest stages of galaxy development. Initial data from this multiyear effort was presented at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in January 2014.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Summers, B. Lawton, M. Lussier, G. Bacon, and D. Coe (STScI)

Music: “The Moments of Our Mornings” (K. Engel)/CC BY-NC 3.0