space

October 14, 2016

A Deep View Down Broadway

Abell 2744 Parallel Deep Field from the Hubble Frontier Fields Project Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer, and the HFF Team (STScI)

Abell 2744 Parallel Deep Field from the Hubble Frontier Fields Project
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer, and the HFF Team (STScI)

[Note: this blog post also appears on the Hubble’s Universe Unfiltered blog.]

One of the more philosophical concepts that astronomers have to deal with on an everyday basis is the commingling of space and time in astronomical images.

The underlying idea is straightforward. The speed of light is finite. Light from a star or nebula or galaxy takes a measurable amount of time to cross the space between it and us. Hence, the light we see now left that object at some previous time. We view astronomical objects as they were in the past. As I like to say, looking out in space is also looking back in time.

The implications of this maxim are considerable, especially in dealing with the deep field images from Hubble (see the accompanying image of the Abell 2744 Parallel deep field). Such images contain a wonderful assortment of galaxies, with a few stars here and there. Each object is at a different position in space, both in the two-dimensional sense of a different position within the image and in the three-dimensional sense of being at a different distance from Earth. Further, objects at different distances are seen at different times in the past. Hence, astronomers must examine these deep field images in four-dimensional space-time.

Tackling the expanse of space and time in these images can be mind-boggling. We’ll start with the stars, which are easier to understand. All the stars are local, within our Milky Way galaxy. These stars are generally hundreds to thousands of light-years away. The light we observe today might have left the star while the pyramids of Egypt were being built. Because stars don’t change appreciably on scales of thousands of years, stars in deep fields are just like stars in other astronomical images.

The galaxies, however, stretch much farther into space. The nearest are many millions of light-years away, while the most distant are around ten billion light-years away. Galaxies don’t change much on million-year timescales. For example, it takes over 200 million years for our Sun to orbit once within our galaxy. Even though the light may have left a galaxy when dinosaurs first started to dominate our planet, the same galaxy would look similar today. Thus, the nearby galaxies in these images are comparable to local galaxies.

Given billions of years, however, galaxies do change, and these deep field images provide compelling evidence. Distant galaxies do not have the standard spiral and elliptical shapes. They are often elongated, have bright spots of star formation, and are much smaller in size. We see galaxies as they were before the Sun, Earth, and the solar system formed. We study the development of galaxies over time to see how they form and grow. The perplexing point is that, for any given galaxy in the image, there is no distinct visual indicator of its distance in space or time. The layers of the universe are jumbled together across the image, and it is a grand puzzle of cosmology to sort them out.

The usual method to determine distances, and therefore times, is to measure the cosmological redshift of each galaxy. That concept has been discussed in a Frontier Fields blog post by Dr. Brandon Lawton: “Light Detectives: Using Color to Estimate Distance”. Thus, I’d like to take this essay in a different direction.

The Manhattan Deep Field

When discussing the cosmic mixture of space-time with an artist visiting from Spain, I happened upon a novel idea for a human-centric analogy.

Imagine you are in New York City, specifically Times Square in Manhattan. You look down Broadway to the southern end of the island about 4 miles away. If the speed of light were extremely slow, traveling only one mile per century, what would you see?

Each mile down Broadway would represent one hundred years of New York’s history. Each block would be 5 to 10 years earlier in the development of the metropolis.

A quarter of a mile away, the southern end of the theater district would appear as it did in the early 1990s when “Miss Saigon” came to Broadway. Only a few blocks farther would be the disco era and the civil unrest of the 1960s, then the World War II years and the Great Depression.

The Empire State Building, about a mile away, would vanish, as it was not built until 1931. At a similar distance, Madison Square Garden would be seen hosting heavyweight boxing matches in its original building, before the demolition and re-construction in the late 1920s.

Progressing another mile down Broadway to Union Square would travel back past the Civil War, Tammany Hall politics, economic growth fostered by the Erie Canal, and Alexander Hamilton’s original run on the New York stage.

The mile beyond to the SoHo district progresses through the times of New York as the capital of the United States, the Revolutionary War, the founding of Columbia University, and the importation of slaves by the Dutch West Indies Company.

The final mile to Battery Park leads through the colonial era alternately dominated by Dutch or English foreign powers, past the garrison of Fort Amsterdam, to the island’s Native American roots and the initial explorations by Henry Hudson.

A “slow speed of light” view from Times Square would lay out the entire history of the city of New York in a single view. The commingling of space and time would make it the historian’s exceptional equivalent of the astronomer’s standard observation: a deep view down Broadway.

This idea of a time-warped view of New York provides an analogy to what Hubble uncovers: the history of galaxies compressed and jumbled within each deep field. Perhaps it can help you to look at these images from that requisite four-dimensional perspective. These deep field images are truly a trip down memory lane.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

January 21, 2015

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:

macs

And here is the parallel field:

 macs2

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

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.

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.

September 5, 2014

Edwin Hubble Expands Our View of the Universe

by Donna Weaver and Ann Jenkins

American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889–1953) never lived to see the development or launch of his namesake, the Hubble Space Telescope. But like the telescope that bears his name, Dr. Hubble played a crucial role in advancing the field of astronomy and changing the way we view the universe. As Hubble’s namesake is breaking new ground in the exploration of the distant universe via the Frontier Fields, let us take a step back and learn more about Hubble, the man.

This is an illustration of Dr. Edwin Powell Hubble.

Edwin Hubble is regarded as one of the most important observational cosmologists of the 20th century. Illustration credit: Kathy Cordes of STScI.

As a young boy, Edwin Hubble read tales of traveling to undersea cities, journeying to the center of the Earth, and trekking to the remote mountains of South Africa. These stories by adventure novelists Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard stoked young Hubble’s imagination of faraway places. He fulfilled those childhood dreams as an astronomer, exploring distant galaxies with a telescope and developing celestial theories that revolutionized astronomy.

But Hubble didn’t settle immediately on the astronomy profession. He studied law as a Rhodes Scholar at Queens College in Oxford, England. A year after passing the bar exam, Hubble realized that his love of exploring the stars was greater than his attraction to law, so he abandoned law for astronomy. “I chucked the law for astronomy and I knew that, even if I were second rate or third rate, it was astronomy that mattered,” Hubble said. (1)

Our Galaxy Is Not Alone

He studied astronomy at the University of Chicago and completed his doctoral thesis in 1917. After serving in World War I, he began working at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, Calif., studying the faint patches of luminous “fog” or nebulae — the Latin word for clouds — in the night sky. Hubble and other astronomers were puzzled by these gas clouds and wanted to know what they were.

Using the 100-inch reflecting Hooker Telescope — the largest telescope of its day — Hubble peered beyond our Milky Way Galaxy to study an object known then as the Andromeda Nebula. He discovered special, “variable stars” on the outskirts of the nebula that changed in brightness over time. These stars brightened and dimmed in a predictable way that allowed Hubble to determine their distances from Earth. Hubble showed that the distance to the nebula was so great that it had to be outside the Milky Way Galaxy. Hubble realized that the Andromeda Nebula was a separate galaxy much like our own. The discovery of the Andromeda Galaxy helped change our understanding of the universe by proving the existence of other galaxies.

Hubble also devised the classification system for galaxies, grouping them by sizes and shapes, that astronomers still use today. He also obtained extensive evidence that the laws of physics outside our galaxy are the same as on Earth, verifying the principle of the uniformity of nature.

The Expanding Universe

As Hubble continued his study, he made another startling discovery: The universe is expanding. In 1929 he determined that the more distant the galaxy is from Earth, the faster it appears to move away. Known as Hubble’s Law, this discovery is the foundation of the Big Bang theory. The theory says that the universe began after a huge cosmic explosion and has been expanding ever since. Hubble’s discovery is considered one of the greatest triumphs of 20th-century astronomy.

Albert Einstein could have foretold Hubble’s discovery in 1917 when he applied his newly developed General Theory of Relativity to the universe. His theory — that space is curved by gravity — predicted that the universe could not be static but had to expand or contract. Einstein found this prediction so unbelievable that he modified his original theory to avoid the problem. Upon learning of Hubble’s discovery, Einstein immediately regretted revising his theory.

For his many contributions to astronomy, Hubble is regarded as one of the most important observational cosmologists of the 20th century.

(1) As quoted by Nicholas U. Mayall (1970). Biographical memoir. Volume 41, Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences (U.S.). National Academy of Sciences. p. 179.

July 9, 2014

Seeing Double (or More!) in Frontier Fields Images

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.

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.

abell multiple

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.

Abell2744-multilens-1+markers Abell2744-multilens-3+markers

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.

 

June 9, 2014

How Hubble Observations Are Proposed

This is the first in a three-part series. 

Time on the Hubble Space Telescope is a precious commodity. As a space telescope, Hubble can observe 24 hours a day, but its advantageous perch also attracts a large number of astronomers who want to use it. The current oversubscription rate—the amount of time requested versus time awarded—is six to one.

The process of observing with Hubble begins with the annual Call for Proposals issued by the Space Telescope Science Institute to the astronomical community. Astronomers worldwide are given approximately two months to submit a Phase I proposal that makes a scientific case for using the telescope. Scientists typically request the amount of telescope time they desire in orbits. It takes 96 minutes for the telescope to make one trip around the Earth, but because the Earth usually blocks the target for part of the orbit, typical observing time is only about 55 minutes per orbit.

Longer observations require a more compelling justification since only a limited number of orbits are available. Winning proposals must be well reasoned and address a significant astronomical question or issue. Potential users must also show that they can only accomplish their observations with Hubble ’s unique capabilities and cannot achieve similar results with a ground-based observatory.

The Institute assembles a time allocation committee (TAC), comprising experts from the astronomical community, to determine which proposals will receive observing time. The committee is subdivided into panels that review the proposals submitted within a particular astronomical category. Sample categories include stellar populations, solar system objects, and cosmology. The committee organizers take care to safeguard the process from conflicts of interest, as many of the panel members are likely to have submitted, or to be a co-investigator, on their own proposals.

The time allocation committee (TAC) discusses which proposals will receive observing time on Hubble.

The time allocation committee (TAC) discusses which proposals will receive observing time on Hubble.

Proposals are further identified as general observer (GO), which range in size from a single orbit to several hundred, or snapshot, which require only 45 minutes or less of telescope time. Snapshots are used to fill in gaps within Hubble ’s observing schedule that cannot be filled by general observer programs. Once the committee has reviewed the proposals and voted on them, it provides a recommended list to the Institute director for final approval.

In my next post, I will discuss how observations are planned.

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.