Atek added that when contributions from the massive and bright galaxies were taken into account, it was noticed that those were inadequate to reionize the Universe. A team of astronomers has used the Hubble to make a fascinating discovery that links back to the early days of our universe: a collection of over 250 dwarf galaxies. With the new data, the scientists said they could conclude the universe became fully transparent around 700 million years after the Big Bang.
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To make these discoveries, the team utilised the deepest images of gravitational lensing made so far in three galaxy clusters, which were taken as part of the Hubble Frontier Fields programme.
Astronomers are using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to look deep into the cosmos and witness a few of the earliest galaxies to ever come into existence, according to a recent report in the Astrophysical Journal.
“The most exciting part of this work was the fact that we keep unveiling fainter and fainter galaxies, and they happen to be more and more abundant”, said team member Hakim Atek, a postdoctoral researcher working at Yale and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland. Ultraviolet light was subsequently able to travel over great distances without being blocked by the hydrogen fog.
Astronomers have caught a glimpse of the early universe through data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The team of astronomers is worldwide and Swiss lead and it has discovered the smallest and faintest first generation dwarf galaxies. The galaxy clusters had accumulated and produced gravitational fields that magnified light from nearby faint galaxies found behind the clusters.
Co-author of the study Mathilde Jauzac, from Durham University, UK, and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, remarks on the significance of the discovery and Hubble’s role in it,”Hubble remains unrivalled in its ability to observe the most distant galaxies”.
The study highlights the impressive possibilities of the Frontier Fields program. Other co-authors represent the Observatoire de Lyon, Aix Marseille Université, and CNRS, in France; the Université de Genève, in Switzerland; the University of Hawaii; and the University of Arizona. Gravitational lensing is caused by massive clusters of galaxies warping spacetime.
Normally, such distant sources of light would be too far away for Hubble’s lens to see.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1 2403, one of the six clusters looked at in the study.
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This groundbreaking observation comes over 25 years since Hubble was launched in 1990, and yet it is still breaking new barriers that no other observatory can now accomplish.
