Thursday, 17 October 2013

Most Distant Gravitational Lens Helps Weigh Galaxies and Deepens a Galactic Mystery



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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. The observation 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.




via HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2013/48/

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