The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a spectacular image showing a vast collection of galaxies located around four billion light-years from Earth. The cluster, known as Abell 370, is located in the constellation Cetus and contains hundreds of individual galaxies.
Abell 370 is the first target of a new Hubble mission known as the BUFFALO survey which aims to broaden our understanding of the cosmos by searching for some of the earliest and most distant galaxies in the universe. It will do this by observing six massive galaxy clusters.
Hubble has already detected some of the oldest known galaxies, but it has only observed a handful, making it difficult for astronomers to know whether they represent the universe at large.
In the search for early and distant galaxies, a cosmological trick known as “gravitational lensing” can help astronomers to see faint objects that may not be viewable otherwise.
We can see lensing at work very clearly in the latest image. Essentially, we can think of it as nature’s magnifying glass. The immense mass of Abell 370—which is made up of both normal and dark matter—and its resulting gravitational influence bends and distorts the light coming from even more distant objects behind it.
This can be seen numerous times in the image and is perhaps best demonstrated by a feature visible just below the center of the cluster which has been nicknamed “the Dragon”. It's made up several duplicated images of a spiral galaxy which lies beyond Abell 370, around five billion light-years away.
The BUFFALO survey—which stands for "Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields and Legacy Observations"—was designed to succeed the Frontier Fields project, which observed the same six galaxy clusters. BUFFALO's main goal is to investigate how and when the most massive and luminous galaxies in the universe formed and how early galaxy formation is linked to dark matter assembly.
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This will enable astronomers to determine how rapidly galaxies formed in the first 800 million years after the Big Bang, paving the way for future observations with the upcoming James Webb Telescope—a next-generation space observatory.
BUFFALO will be able to detect the most distant galaxies around ten times more efficiently than the Frontier Fields program due to its extended field of view. This will allow for better three-dimensional mapping of the mass distribution of both ordinary and dark matter within each galaxy cluster.
The galaxy cluster Abell 370 was the first target of the BUFFALO survey, which aims to search for some of the first galaxies in the Universe. NASA, ESA, A. Koekemoer, M. Jauzac, C. Steinhardt, and the BUFFALO team
Dark matter is a hypothetical substance that scientists believe comprises around 85 percent of all the matter in the universe, although, to date, it has never been directly observed. It does not appear to interact with observable electromagnetic radiation, such as light, making it extremely difficult to detect with normal astronomical technology.
Hubble, which is jointly operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, has been operating for more than 28 years. In that time, it has captured some of the most dramatic and striking images of our universe. While not the first space observatory to be launched, it is both one of the largest and most versatile, providing astronomers with numerous options for observing the cosmos.
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