Scientists Solve Mystery of Odd Patterns of Oxygen in Solar System's Earliest Rocks

Cosmochemists have solved a long standing mystery in the formation of the solar system: Oxygen, the most abundant element in Earth's crust, follows a strange, anomalous pattern in the oldest, most pristine rocks, one that must result from a different chemical process than the well-understood reactions that form minerals containing oxygen on Earth.

"Whatever the source of the anomaly must be a major process in the formation of the solar system, but it has remained a matter of contention," said Mark Thiemens, dean of the University of California, San Diego's division of physical sciences and professor of chemistry. "Our experiments essentially recreate the early solar system in that they take gas phase molecules and make a solid, a silicate that is essentially the building block of planets."

By re-creating conditions in the solar nebula, the swirl of gas that coalesced to form our star, the planets and the remnant rocky debris that circles the Sun as asteroids, the researchers demonstrated that a simple chemical reaction, governed by known physical principles, can generate silicate dust with oxygen anomalies that match those found in the oldest rocks in the solar system, they report in the early online edition of Science October 24.

Scientists first noted the discrepancy forty years ago in a stony meteorite that exploded over Pueblito de Allende, Mexico, and it has been confirmed in other meteorites as well. These stony meteorites, asteroids that fell to Earth, are some of the oldest objects in the solar system, believed to have formed nearly 4.6 billion years ago with the solar nebula's first million years. The mix between oxygen-16, the most abundant form with one neutron for each proton, and variants with an extra neutron or two, is strikingly different from that seen in terrestrial rocks from Earth, its moon and Mars.

"Oxygen isotopes in meteorites are hugely different from those of the terrestrial planets," said Subrata Chakraborty, a project scientist in chemistry at UC San Diego and the lead author of the report. "With oxygen being the third most abundant element in the universe and one of the major rock forming elements, this variation among different solar system bodies is a puzzle that must be solved to understand how the solar system formed and evolved."

Oxygen isotopes usually sort out according to mass: oxygen-17, with just one extra neutron, is incorporated into molecules half as often as oxygen-18, with two extra neutrons. In these stony meteorites though, the two heavier oxygen isotopes show up in equal proportions. The rates at which they are incorporated into minerals forming these earliest rocks was independent of their masses. Thiemens and John Heidenreich demonstrated such mass-independent fractionation of oxygen isotopes in the formation of ozone thirty years ago, but the mechanism for a similar process in forming the solid building blocks of rocks has not be demonstrated experimentally before now.

Indeed, several competing ideas have been put forth as potential explanations for the anomaly. Some have suggested that the mix of oxygen isotopes was different back when the earliest solid matter in the solar system formed, perhaps enriched by matter blasted in from a nearby supernova. Others had proposed a photochemical effect called self-shielding, which this team has previously ruled out. The last-standing idea was that a physical chemical principle called symmetry could account for the observed patterns of oxygen isotopes.

To test that idea, Chakraborty filled a hockey puck sized chamber with pure oxygen, varying amounts of pure hydrogen and a little black nugget of solid silicon monoxide. He used a laser to vaporize a plume of silicon monoxide gas into the mix. These are ingredients seen by radiotelescopes in instellar clouds, the starting point for our solar system.

The silicon monoxide gas reacted with the oxygen and hydrogen to form silicon dioxide, a solid that settled as dust in the chamber and is the basis of silicate minerals like quartz that are so prevalent in the crust of Earth. These reactions of gases formed the earliest solid materials in the solar system.

When Chakraborty and Petia Yanchulova, a physics student and co-author of the paper, collected and analyzed the dust, they saw a mix of oxygen isotopes that matched the anomalous pattern found in stony meteorites. The degree of the anomaly scaled with the percentage of the atmosphere that was hydrogen, an observation that points to a reaction governed by symmetry.

Read more at Science Daily

Monkey That Purrs Like a Cat Is Among New Species Discovered in Amazon Rainforest

At least 441 new species of animals and plants have been discovered over a four year period in the vast, underexplored rainforest of the Amazon, including a monkey that purrs like a cat.

Found between 2010 and 2013, the species include a flame-patterned lizard, a thumbnail-sized frog, a vegetarian piranha, a brightly coloured snake, and a beautiful pink orchid, according to World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Discovered by a group of scientists and compiled by WWF, the new species number 258 plants, 84 fish, 58 amphibians, 22 reptiles, 18 birds and one mammal. This total does not include countless discoveries of insects and other invertebrates.

"These species form a unique natural heritage that we need to conserve. This means protecting their home -- the amazing Amazon rainforest -- which is under threat from deforestation and dam development," said Claudio Maretti, Leader of Living Amazon Initiative, WWF.

Some of the most remarkable species outlined in the report include:

• Flame-patterned lizard: This beautiful lizard was found from the hatchlings of eggs collected by scientists in the Colombian Amazon. An elusive species, Cercosaura hypnoides, has not been seen in the wild since the original eggs were collected, raising the prospect that it could potentially be endangered.

• • Thumbnail-sized frog: This amphibian is already believed to be highly endangered. In fact, its Latin name, Allobates amissibilis, meaning "that may be lost," alludes to this as the area where it thrives could soon be opened to tourism. This is now the third Allobates species found in Guyana.
• • Vegetarian Piranha: This new species of piranha, Tometes camunani, can span 20 inches wide and weigh up to 9 pounds, and is strictly herbivorous. The freshwater fish inhabits rocky rapids associated with seedlings of plants that grow among the rocks, its main source of food. Tometes is described from the upper drainages of the Trombetas River basin, Para, Brazilian Amazon.
• • A brightly coloured snake from the "Lost World": Found in the mountains of Guyana, this brightly-colored snake species was named Chironius challenger after Arthur C. Doyle's fictional character Professor George Edward Challenger in the novel, The Lost World.
• • A beautiful pink orchid: Among the new plant species are a large number of new orchid species, including this splendid pink species, Sobralia imavieirae, officially described by scientists from Roraima in the Brazilian Amazon.
• • Caqueta titi monkey: This new species, Callicebus caquetensis, is one of about 20 species of titi monkey, which all live in the Amazon basin. The babies have an endearing trait, "When they feel very content they purr towards each other," explained scientist Thomas Defler.
• Many of the new discoveries are believed to be endemic to the Amazon rainforest and are found nowhere else in the world. This makes them even more vulnerable to rainforest destruction that occurs every minute across the Amazon.

Read more at Science Daily

Scorpion-Eating Mice Feel No Sting

The sting of the Arizona bark scorpion is so fierce that humans say the pain is like being hit by a hammer. But the tiny grasshopper mouse shakes off the sting like it's nothing.

Now, researchers have found for the mouse, the sting really is nothing. Instead of causing pain, the scorpion venom blocks it, a fact that could lead to the development of new pain-blocking drugs for people.

"The venom actually blocks the pain signal that the venom is trying to send" to the mouse, said study researcher Ashlee Rowe of Michigan State University. "We don't want to try to sound too cute or anything, but it is sort of like an evolutionary martial art, where the grasshopper mice are turning the tables. They're using their opponents' strength against them."

Fierce mouse

Southern grasshopper mice (Onychomys torridus) are carnivorous desert-dwellers. Among their favorite meals are the Arizona bark scorpions (Centruroides sculpturatus). The scorpions' sting would kill any other rodent the size of the grasshopper mouse, but the little rodent can absorb many stings in the course of attacking a scorpion. In studying this phenomenon, Rowe noticed not only did the mice survive, but they also seemed unconcerned.

"I was really intrigued by the fact that the mice, if they get stung, they just groom a little bit and then it's over," Rowe told LiveScience.

Clearly, the mice had evolved to handle the pain. To find out how, Rowe and her colleagues analyzed how the toxin acts on the nerve cells called nociceptors that pick up and relay pain to the mouse's brain.

Nerve cells communicate pain to the brain by translating stimuli into electric pulses. To do so, tiny channels in the cell membrane, called ion channels, open and close. One ubiquitous type of ion channel, the sodium/potassium channel, is present in cells throughout the body. This channel makes critical bodily functions, from breathing to muscle contractions, possible.

Typically, scorpion venom acts directly on sodium/potassium channels in nociceptors to create the sensation of pain. A specialized channel known as channel 1.7 is responsible for picking up the pain signal, whereas a channel called channel 1.8 carries it to the brain.

"They just turn (the nerve) on and send that signal to the brain," Rowe said.

Not so in the grasshopper mouse. In these rodents, the scorpion toxin binds to channel 1.8.

Cutting a wire

By binding to this transport channel, the toxin shuts it down, effectively blocking itself, Rowe and her colleagues report Friday (Oct. 25) in the journal Science.

"It's kind of like cutting a wire," Rowe said.

The finding explains why the mice seem to feel almost no pain when stung. Instead of acting as a painful stimulus, the toxin ends up acting like an analgesic.

Rowe thinks the grasshopper mice may be one of several animals that have evolved to withstand the scorpion's sting. She's currently investigating three possible creatures that might also feel no pain — though she prefers to keep the identities of those animals a secret until further testing. (Rowe won't be forcing scorpion showdowns in the name of this research; rather, she'll do genetic testing to look for signs of venom resistance.)

The ultimate goal of this work is to find new ways to ease pain in humans.

Read more at Discovery News

Arctic Temperatures Highest in 44,000 Years

Plenty of studies have shown that the Arctic is warming and that the ice caps are melting, but how does it compare to the past, and how serious is it?

New research shows that average summer temperatures in the Canadian Arctic over the last century are the highest in the last 44,000 years, and perhaps the highest in 120,000 years.

"The key piece here is just how unprecedented the warming of Arctic Canada is," Gifford Miller, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a joint statement from the school and the publisher of the journal Geophysical Researcher Letters, in which the study by Miller and his colleagues was published online this week. "This study really says the warming we are seeing is outside any kind of known natural variability, and it has to be due to increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

The study is the first to show that current Arctic warmth exceeds peak heat there in the early Holocene, the name for the current geological period, which began about 11,700 years ago. During this "peak" Arctic warmth, solar radiation was about 9 percent greater than today, according to the study.

Miller and his colleagues gauged Arctic temperatures by looking at gas bubbles trapped in ice cores (cylinders drilled from the ice that show layers of snow laid down over time) taken from the region, which allows scientists to reconstruct past temperature and levels of precipitation. They paired this with radiocarbon dating of clumps of moss taken from a melting ice cap on Canada's Baffin Island. Their analysis shows that these plants have been trapped in the ice for at least 44,000 years, and perhaps as long as 120,000 years. Taken together, that data suggest temperatures in the region haven't been this high since perhaps as long as 120,000 years ago, according to the study.

Read more at Discovery News

Face-Shape Secrets May Lie in 'Junk' DNA

Face shape is largely determined by genetics, yet no two faces are entirely alike. How do genes bring about faces with subtle differences while avoiding dramatic disruptions and facial malformations such as cleft lip and palate? The answer may be in the "junk DNA," a new study has found.

Noncoding DNA, sometimes called junk DNA, refers to sequences in a genome that don't produce proteins, some of which are thought to have no known biological function.

Studying mice, researchers identified more than 4,000 small regions in the genome that are likely a type of noncoding DNA called enhancers, which amplify the expression of a gene. In this case, these regions were active while the face of a mouse embryo developed, according to the study, detailed in the Oct. 25 issue of the journal Science.

Most of these enhancer sequences are found in humans as well, so it is likely that they have similar face-shaping functions in humans, the researchers said.

"Our results suggest it is likely there are thousands of enhancers in the human genome that are somehow involved in craniofacial development," study researcher Axel Visel, a geneticist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's genomics division, said in a statement. "We don't know yet what all of these enhancers do, but we do know that they are out there and they are important for craniofacial development."

To test whether these enhancers are indeed important in shaping the face, the researchers deleted three of the enhancers in mice and compared them with normal mice at 8 weeks of age. The results showed that each enhancer deletion caused a distinct set of differences in the shape of the face -- for instance, causing an increase or decrease in facial length and an increase or decrease in the width of various parts of the face, such as the base of the skull or the palate.

In the study, to avoid the challenge of recognizing individual mouse faces, the researchers created 3D images using a process called microcomputed tomography to link changes in face shape with alterations in the function of each of the enhancers.

Identifying enhancers that regulate a gene's activity is challenging, because such enhancers aren't necessarily located next to their target gene; rather, they could be acting from "long-distance" locations in the genome.

Many of the genetic defects that cause facial flaws such as clefts of the lip or palate have been identified, but only a small number of genes have been implicated in normal variation of the face's shape, the researchers said.

Read more at Discovery News

This Is The Coldest Place In The Universe

As October progresses and winter slowly but surely approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, trees begin to lose their leaves and temperatures steadily drop. Think it’s been getting cold out at night where you live?

It’s nothing like this.

At a positively frigid one Kelvin (that equates to –458 degrees Fahrenheit or –272 degrees Celsius), the Boomerang Nebula in the constellation Centaurus is officially the coldest known place in the entire Universe. It’s even colder than the background temperature of space!

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, astronomers have taken a better look at this freezing cloud of gas and dust to learn more about its frigid properties.

The Boomerang Nebula has been imaged before by both ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope, and appears in visible light to be shaped like a bow tie (or two opposing, overlapped boomerangs). But new observations using ALMA’s high-resolution capabilities have revealed its true form.

“What seemed like a double lobe, or ‘boomerang’ shape, from Earth-based optical telescopes, is actually a much broader structure that is expanding rapidly into space,” said Raghvendra Sahai, a researcher and principal scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

A thick belt of dust particles has also been found – thanks to ALMA – surrounding the star within the nebula, which prevents some wavelengths of light from passing through and creating the bow tie shape seen in previous visible light images.

So why is this nebula so incredibly cold? It’s actually cooling itself off as it grows, astronomers have found.

As the sun-like star at its center nears the end of its life it expands the nebula with rapidly outpouring gas. That expansion creates a cooling effect — similar to how expanding gas in refrigerators helps keep your ice cream from melting.

The gas in this nebula is traveling much faster than anything in your fridge, though — 500,000 km/hour (310,000 mph).

At one Kelvin the Boomerang nebula is even colder than the coldest known places in our solar system: the permanently-shadowed craters at the moon’s south pole that never receive sunlight. Even those pockets of darkness are a balmy 33 Kelvin. (For comparison, water freezes at 273.15 K.)

For that matter, even in the midst of intergalactic space where there’s “nothing” is still warmer — the cosmic microwave background glows at a steady 2.8 K.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient Bees, Dinos May Have Died Out Together

The ancestors of modern carpenter bees may have vanished from Earth roughly 65 million years ago, around the same time the dinosaurs were wiped out, a new study finds.

Researchers examined the DNA of four types of carpenter bees -- belonging to the group Xylocopinae -- from every continent, except Antarctica, to search for clues about their evolutionary relationships. Peering back into the lineages of the bees, the scientists noticed something unusual with all four groups, beginning roughly 65 million years ago, at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods.

"We can track periods of diversification and stasis," lead study author Sandra Rehan, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of New Hampshire, told LiveScience. "There was a period where there was no genetic diversification happening for millions of years -- a real dearth of speciation. This is an indication of a mass extinction event."

The end of the Cretaceous Period, corresponding to the beginning of the Paleogene Period, was already known to be a dynamic time in history. It is commonly thought that a massive asteroid or comet slammed into Earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and killing up to 80 percent of all species.

"We found this mass extinction event signature in the DNA that just happened to correspond to the extinction of dinosaurs, which was a major change in the global diversity at the time," Rehan said.

Rehan and her colleagues did not study possible relationships between the bee and dinosaur extinctions, but said the similar timings act as secondary support for both theories.

Since there are no reliable fossil records for carpenter bees, the researchers used a technique called molecular phylogenetics. This involves analyzing DNA sequences and searching through the data for evolutionary insights. To understand where in time evolutionary changes were happening, the researchers used fossils of other types of bees as reference points.

"We used fossils of other lineages of bees to make inferences and calibrate time," Rehan explained. "Then, we backtracked over time."

The new research suggests the bee extinction lasted about 10 million years, she added.

The findings should generate great interest in the field, said John Ascher, assistant professor in the department of biological sciences at the National University of Singapore and a research associate in the division of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. But Ascher, who wasn't involved in the current research, said studies that use molecular phylogenetics tend to be "speculative in their reliance on unrealistic and insufficiently justified evolutionary models."

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient Magic Curse Tablet Found in Jerusalem

A lead curse tablet, dating back around 1,700 years and likely written by a magician, has been discovered in a collapsed Roman mansion in Jerusalem, archaeologists report.

The mansion, which is being excavated by the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Givati Parking Lot, is located in what is known as the "City of David," an area that holds at least 6,000 years of human occupation. The mansion itself covers at least 2,000 square meters (about half an acre) and contains two large open courtyards adjacent to each other. It was in use between the late third century and A.D. 363, when it was destroyed in a series of earthquakes on May 18 or 19.

The text is written in Greek and, in it a woman named Kyrilla invokes the names of six gods to cast a curse on a man named Iennys, apparently over a legal case.

"I strike and strike down and nail down the tongue, the eyes, the wrath, the ire, the anger, the procrastination, the opposition of Iennys," part of the curse reads in translation. Kyrilla asks the gods to ensure that "he in no way oppose, so that he say or perform nothing adverse to Kyrilla … but rather that Iennys, whom the womb bore, be subject to her…"

To obtain her goal Kyrilla combined elements from four religions, Robert Walter Daniel, of the Institut für Altertumskunde at the University of Cologne, told LiveScience in an email. Of six gods invoked, four of them are Greek (Hermes, Persephone, Pluto and Hecate), one is Babylonian (Ereschigal) and one, Abrasax, is Gnostic, a religion connected to early Christianity. Additionally, the text contains magic words such as "Iaoth" that have a Hebrew/Judaism origin.

A professional magician likely created the curse for Kyrilla, who may have literally used a hammer and nails to perform a magical rite that enhanced the effectiveness of the curse, Daniel said.

"The hammering and nailing is a form of gaining control over the person(s) targeted in magical texts," he wrote in the email.

Kyrilla and her curse-recipient, both probably members of the Roman middle or upper class, were likely in some legal dispute, as the curse tablet bears similarities to others found in Cyprus that are known to have been used in legal cases. Additionally the word "opposition" in this text hints at a legal matter.

Exploring the mansion

The newfound artifacts hint at the wealth the occupants of the mansion would have enjoyed and include a miniature head of a fighter used as a scale-weight and several gems, including one engraved with an image of Cupid holding a torch.

The tablet was excavated in the northwest part of the mansion. While the second-floor room where the tablet was originally placed has collapsed, the artifacts excavated near the tablet provide hints about what the room may have looked like when in use.

Archaeologists Doron Ben Ami and Yana Tchekhanovets, both with the Israel Antiquities Authority, told LiveScience in an email they discovered the remains of mosaics and frescos that contain geometric and floral motifs near the tablet. They also found carved bone fragments from a box that depict the "Triumph of Dionysus," a Greek god, along with maritime imagery such as seahorses.

The team also uncovered roof tiles in the mansion that contain the stamp of the Roman 10th legion, a unit that, for a time, was stationed in Jerusalem. "This practice is common for all the provinces of the Roman Empire. In peaceful times soldiers were responsible for 'civil engineering': They built roads and aqueducts, produced tiles and bricks, etc. The 10th legion produced so many tiles, that it was enough for many more years of construction activity in the city, long after the legion itself left Jerusalem," Ben Ami and Tchekhanovets said.

The researchers also found female figurines, probably depicting a goddess. They were likely used in a "private cult" whose members included residents of the mansion. These figurines were found at or below floor level and may not have been part of the second-floor room that the curse was placed in.

Read more at Discovery News

5 Intriguing Facts About the Roma

Their names are as mysterious as their origins: Often called the Roma or the Romani people, they're also known as gitanos in Spain, Kale in Finland and Portugal, Manush or gitan in France and Travelers in Scandinavia.

And almost everywhere they go, they're referred to -- somewhat pejoratively -- as gypsies, a people who have migrated throughout the world over the course of several centuries.

The Roma have one of the most dramatic stories in human history, but few people know their ancient tale of travel, persecution and survival. Here are five intriguing facts about the Romani people:

1. The Roma originated in India

There's a wealth of evidence -- from genetics as well as linguistics -- that the Roma are originally a Hindi people from northern India. Many of the words and grammatical rules of the Romani language are virtually identical to those of the Hindi language.

A 2012 study, published in the journal Cell Biology, analyzed genomic data from 13 Romani communities across Europe. The researchers concluded that the Roma people left northern India about 1,500 years ago; those Roma now in Europe migrated through the Balkans starting about 900 years ago. These data confirm written reports of Roma groups arriving in medieval Europe in the 1100s.

2. There are about 12 million Roma worldwide

After leaving northern India, most Romani went to Europe: In some Eastern European countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria, they form up to 12 percent of the total population. The Roma are also numerous in Turkey, which has about 2.75 million Romani, according to The New York Times: Other European countries with large Roma populations include Russia, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Spain and France.

Though concentrated in Europe, there are also Romani populations on every occupied continent -- about 1 million live in the United States, and roughly 800,000 in Brazil. But no matter where they go, the Roma seem to be unwelcomed.

3. The Romani faced horrific persecution

Shortly after arriving in Europe, the Romani were enslaved in many regions, a cultural heritage that continued into the 19th century in countries like Romania. In England, Switzerland and Denmark, the Romani were put to death throughout the medieval era. Many countries, such as Germany, Italy and Portugal, ordered the expulsion of all Romani.

There are countless reports of Roma children being abducted from their parents, women who had their ears cut off, and Romani who were branded with hot irons. In an effort to force assimilation, the use of their native language was forbidden in some countries; other places forbade the Roma to marry among themselves.

Perhaps the most devastating persecution of the Romani occurred during World War II, when they were among the first targets of Nazi atrocities, according to the BBC. An estimated 2 million Romani died in concentration camps and through other means of extermination.

In the post-war era, the Romani remained an oppressed group, especially in the Soviet Union. As recently as the 1980s, Roma women in Czechoslovakia were forced to undergo sterilization to limit the Romani population.

4. Roma culture is a rich and fascinating collage

The Romani are often celebrated for their musical heritage, which has influenced jazz, bolero, flamenco music, as well as classical composers including Franz Liszt.

While it's believed that the Roma were originally Hindu, over the centuries, most Romani have adopted the religions of their host countries. The majority of Roma communities now practice a form of Islam or Christianity that retains some Romani influences.

Traditional Roma society still arranges marriages between minors as young as 12, according to the BBC. Teenage brides are sometimes bartered and traded between Roma communities, an activity that has alarmed European officials concerned with human trafficking.

A 2006 report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) also found that some Roma communities practice child trafficking; children have reportedly been engaged for labor, petty crime and sexual exploitation.

5. The Romani remain an oppressed group

Many Romani avoid assimilation with the larger societies of their host countries -- this may be a legacy of centuries of persecution. Because of their isolation, many Roma children do not attend school; Romani typically lack access to stable jobs, affordable housing, health care and other social services. As a result, poverty, disease, substance abuse and crime plague many Roma communities.

For these and other reasons, the Romani remain a persecuted minority, including those living in affluent European countries with enviable social services. Authorities in Italy have denied housing to Roma families -- even those born in Italy -- on the grounds that people living in cheap, makeshift metal containers in isolated Roma camps already have permanent housing, according to the Guardian.

This month, protests erupted in France after authorities detained a Roma teenage girl at school; soon thereafter, she and her entire family were deported to Kosovo. In the past year, about 10,000 Roma were expelled from France after their camps were destroyed, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Read more at Discovery News

Frontier Fields: Hubble Lens to Get Superboost

Hoping to get a sneak peak at the early universe NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is expected to reveal, astronomers are attempting to boost the imaging prowess of the Hubble Space Telescope by taking advantage of naturally occurring zoom lenses in space.

The three-year Hubble Frontier Fields project will make use of the light-bending gravity of six massive galaxy clusters to probe for dimmer, more distant objects behind them.

“You put a bunch of mass in the way of some distant galaxies and it actually magnifies them and makes them easier to see,” astronomer Steven Finkelstein, with University of Texas at Austin, told Discovery News.

It’s a bit of a fishing expedition since astronomers have only vague (if any) hints of what lies beyond the six galaxy clusters selected as targets for the study.

The clusters were selected in part because they lie within viewing range of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submilliter Array, or ALMA, observatory in Chile, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and other telescopes that will be needed to confirm any objects uncovered by the Hubble probe.

Working with nature’s gravitational lenses isn’t easy, however.

“You don’t automatically know when you look at a galaxy that’s been magnified how much it’s magnified by,” astronomer Jennifer Lotz, with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, told Discovery News.

“You have to understand what that cluster is doing. You have to understand the optics of the natural telescope, which means you have to have a model of what’s going on in the cluster, how massive it is, and so forth. We’ve done that,” Lotz said.

The gravitational lenses should at least triple Hubble’s imaging powers. In some cases, it could bring objects into view that are 10 times beyond what Hubble can see.

Read more at Discovery News