Latest Expert Witness News
Experts 'could view early Universe'
Scientists have found a powerful natural lens in space which could allow them to peer deep into the early Universe.
A survey covering an area nine times the size of the full Moon, a 1.6 square degree of sky, has identified 67 gravitational lensed galaxies, the European Space Agency and the Hubble Information Centre said.
Scientists hope there is now a chance of finding up to half a million similar lenses and one day producing a census of galaxy masses in the Universe.
Gravitational lensing occurs when light travelling towards us from a distant galaxy is magnified and distorted as it encounters a massive object between the galaxy and us. These gravitational lenses often allow astronomers to peer much further back into the early Universe than normal.
High-resolution images from the Hubble telescope were analysed extensively by European astronomers who joined forces with several space-based observatories as part of the Cosmos Project, led by Nick Scoville at the California Institute of Technology.
The Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the XMM-Newton spacecraft, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Subaru Telescope and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) were all part of the project.
Possible galaxies were identified from a galaxy catalogue, comprising more than two million galaxies.
"We then had to look through each individual Cosmos image by eye and identify any potential strong gravitational lenses," said Cecile Faure of the Zentrum fur Astronomie, University of Heidelberg.
Finally, checks were made to see if the foreground galaxy and the lensed galaxy were really different or just one galaxy with an odd shape.
Jean-Paul Kneib, of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, said: "With this sample of gravitational systems identified by the human eye, we now plan to use the sample of lenses to train robot software to find more of these lenses across the entire Hubble image archive, and we may find even more strong lensing systems in the Cosmos field."
back