Faintest Galaxies Ever Seen Explain The 'Missing Link' In The Universe
“By warping space, the light from background objects gets magnified, revealing extraordinarily faint galaxies. The only problem? The cluster itself is closer and overwhelmingly luminous, making it impossible to tease out the distant signals. Until now. Thanks to a superior new technique devised by Rachael Livermore, light from the foreground cluster galaxies can be modeled and subtracted, revealing faint, distant galaxies never seen before.”
One of the biggest puzzles in science is exactly how the Universe became transparent to visible light. Neutral atoms -- cosmic dust -- blocks visible light, and yet before there were stars, that’s all we had. According to theory, it should be large numbers of small, faint, ultra-distant galaxies that made it transparent, but they’ve never been seen. However, thanks to the combined power of the Hubble Space Telescope, gravitational lensing and a new foreground light-removal technique, galaxies 100 times fainter thank the ones visible in the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field -- the longest-exposure image ever -- have now been revealed. These galaxies, seen in two Frontier Fields’ clusters so far, are the ‘missing link’ needed to explain reionization.
Come get the full, stunning story in visuals and no more than 200 words on today’s Mostly Mute Monday!
