NASA | JPL-Caltech | Spitzer Space Telescope | 2016 Sep 28
[img3="Abell 2744: Pandora's Cluster -- Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Spitzer"]http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/uploaded ... g16-18.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]In the ongoing hunt for the universe's earliest galaxies, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has wrapped up its observations for the Frontier Fields project. This ambitious project has combined the power of all three of NASA's Great Observatories -- Spitzer, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- to delve as far back in time and space as current technology can allow.
Even with today's best telescopes, it is difficult to gather enough light from the very first galaxies, located more than 13 billion light years away, to learn much about them beyond their approximate distance. But scientists have a tool of cosmic proportions to help in their studies. The gravity exerted by massive, foreground clusters of galaxies bends and magnifies the light of faraway, background objects, in effect creating cosmic zoom lenses. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing.
The Frontier Fields observations have peered through the strongest zoom lenses available by targeting six of the most massive galaxy clusters known. These lenses can magnify tiny background galaxies by as much as a factor of one hundred. With Spitzer's new Frontier Fields data, along with data from Chandra and Hubble, astronomers will learn unprecedented details about the earliest galaxies. ...
