Hubble captures an image of a "Dragon" really distorted

Ambitious use of the Hubble Space Telescope hopes to map some of the largest, brightest, and farthest galaxies to understand the structure of our universe. Above, an image of this investigation, featuring a strange distorted feature called Dragon.

You may have seen the image of the Hubble Deep Field – the telescope pointed to a seemingly dark sky spot, only to reveal it glittering from distant galaxies. A new survey seeks to greatly expand previous observations of these objects, called the BUFFALO survey (Beyond Ultra-Deep Border Fields and Inherited Observations). The knowledge gained could help scientists understand the deepest questions about our universe, including why it has its structure or the amount of dark matter.

"We are going to get a very high resolution image with Hubble of these galaxy clusters, which will allow us to better understand the first galaxies," said Mathilde Jauzac, research associate at Durham University in Gizmodo.

BUFFALO plans to use 160 hours of Hubble observation time – that's a lot – to double the size of current maps around six clusters of distant galaxies imagined in the Hubble Frontier Fields survey. Basically, they are updating previously collected data to determine how much and how much galaxies are, information that could constrain theories about the evolution of the universe. The observation will reveal some of the oldest galaxies, from the first billion years of the universe.

These observations take advantage of the phenomenon known as gravitational lenses. Gravity distorts the shape of space-time itself and, as a result, light bends around massive regions of space, like clusters of galaxies. This light seems to be distorted. This means that things that are very heavy in space, like clusters of galaxies, act like lenses and can produce enlarged and distorted images of objects behind them. The so-called Dragon, in the center of the image above, is actually five separate images of the same galaxy, distorted by the Abell 370 cluster. The feature was one of the first examples of gravitational lenses never observed, said Jauzac.

There is much to learn from observations of these distant and distorted galaxies. Mapping them all can reveal how galaxies have formed and why the universe takes on its strange web structure. In addition, if you claimed that the Dragon was an arc and that you drew the entire circle, you could determine the mass that caused the warping. You may know that the universe behaves as if it had a lot more mass than we can actually see – the missing mass is called "dark matter". If scientists understand the amount of warping and of them, they can calculate how many things are missing.

This is only the first image of a long window of observation and a period of analysis to follow. In the end, much of the effort will help the future James Webb Space Telescope decide where to look in the sky, said Jauzac.

I keep saying it: there is a shocking amount that we do not understand about this universe.

[via NASA]