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The Hubble Space Telescope captured a dramatic image showing a vast collection of galaxies located approximately four billion light-years away from Earth. The cluster, known as Abell 370, is located in the constellation Cetus and contains hundreds of individual galaxies.
Abell 370 is the first target of a new Hubble mission known as the BUFFALO survey that aims to broaden our understanding of the cosmos by searching for some of the oldest and furthest galaxies in the universe. This will be done by observing six clusters of massive galaxies.
Hubble has already detected some of the oldest known galaxies, but he has only seen a handful, which makes it difficult for astronomers to know if they represent the universe as a whole.
In the search for early and distant galaxies, a cosmological trick called the "gravitational lens" may help astronomers to see weak objects that might otherwise not be visible.
We can see the lens at work very clearly in the last picture. Essentially, we can think of it as a magnifying glass of nature. The immense mass of Abell 370, made up of both normal matter and dark matter, and its resulting gravitational influence twist and deform light from even more distant objects.
This can be seen many times in the image and is perhaps best demonstrated by a feature visible just below the center of the cluster that has been dubbed "the Dragon." There are several duplicate images of a spiral galaxy located beyond Abell 370, about five billion light years away.
The BUFFALO survey – which means "Beyond ultra-deep frontier fields and historical observations" – was designed to succeed the Frontier Fields project, which observed the same six galaxy clusters. The main goal of BUFFALO is to study how and when the most massive and bright galaxies of the universe were formed and how the formation of the first galaxies is related to the assembly of matter black.
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This will allow astronomers to determine how quickly galaxies have formed over the 800 million years since the Big Bang, paving the way for future observations with the upcoming James Webb telescope, a new space observatory. generation.
BUFFALO will be able to detect the most distant galaxies about ten times more efficiently than the Frontier Fields program because of its extended field of view. This will allow better three-dimensional mapping of the mass distribution of ordinary matter and dark matter within each group of galaxies.
Dark matter is a hypothetical substance that, according to scientists, accounts for about 85% of all matter in the universe, though, so far, it has never been directly observed. It does not seem to interact with observable electromagnetic radiation, such as light, which makes it extremely difficult to detect with normal astronomical technology.
Hubble, which is operated jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency, has been operating for more than 28 years. At that time, he captured some of the most spectacular and striking images of our universe. Although it is not the first space observatory to be launched, it is one of the largest and most versatile, providing astronomers with many options for observing the cosmos.
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