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
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