Hubble discovers many galaxies...

Hubble discovers 67 galaxies

IANS NEW YORK

THE Hubble space telescope has discovered 67 “lensing” galaxies in the distant universe, under the massive COSMOS project to map space. Gravitational lensing occurs when light traveling towards us from a distant galaxy is magnified and distorted by unusually huge clusters of other galaxies.
The “lenses” often allow astronomers to peer much further back into the early universe. They come from a recent set of observations, part of a project to survey a stretch of sky nine times the size of the full moon, facilitated by a host of space and earth-based observatories.
The COSMOS project, led by Nick Scoville of the California Institute of Technology, used, among others, the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Jean-Paul Kneib and Cicile Faure of the University of Heidelberg analysed the results from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). “What we are observing here is happening only around a single but very massive galaxy,” said Kneib.
The study of these gravitational lenses will give astronomers a first-rate opportunity to probe the dark matter distribution around galactic lenses. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched in 1999, was named in honour of Indian-American physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who is known for determining the mass limit for white dwarf stars to become neutron stars.