An international team of astronomers has found the most distant gravitational lens yet — a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. The discovery provides a rare opportunity to directly measure the mass of a distant galaxy. But it also poses a mystery: lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare. Given this and other recent finds, astronomers either have been phenomenally lucky — or, more likely, they have underestimated substantially the number of small, very young galaxies in the early Universe.
The release, images and videos are available on:
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1319/
Kind regards,
ESA/Hubble Information Centre
The ESO Education and Public Outreach Department
17 October 2013
|
|
|
|
