Hubble captures the best view of merging galaxies in the Universe … – La Vanguardia

MADRID (IRIN) Space Telescope Hubble NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has obtained the best view so far a collision occurred between two galaxies when Universe was only half its present age.

In this work, astronomers have combined the power of many telescopes on Earth and in space, but also helped to ‘natural’ lens. “While astronomers are often limited by the power of their telescopes, in some cases, our ability to see detail is greatly driven by the natural lens created by the universe,” said lead author Hugo Messias.

These cosmic lenses are created by huge structures like galaxies and clusters of galaxies, which deflect the light from objects behind them because of their strong gravity, an effect called gravitational lensing. The swelling properties of this effect allows astronomers to study objects that would not be visible otherwise and to directly compare local galaxies with other much more remote, seen when the Universe was much younger.

But for these gravitational lenses work, the lensing galaxy, and who is behind it, must be aligned very accurately. “These casual alignments are very rare and tend to be difficult to identify,” Messias added to clarify that “recent studies have shown that observing wavelengths in the far infrared and millimeter waves can be much more efficient.” One of the galaxies studied, H1429-0028 is one of these sources.

is one of the brightest objects in the far infrared regime discovered so far, despite what has been seen, It is a time when the universe was only half its present age. Experts have explained that the system of two colliding galaxies at a much closer object resembles Earth that Hubble has photographed several times before. It is a spectacular collision between two galaxies, which are believed to have had a disc structure in the past. However, this collision is composed of stars with a total rate of only a few tens of times the Sun’s mass every year, while H1429-0028 increases more than 400 times the Sun’s mass of gas into new stars each year.