"Hubble's Inside the Image: Abell 2744"
This is an image of a galaxy cluster called Abell 2744. It’s in the constellation Sculptor. It's
also been nicknamed Pandora's Cluster. A bunch of galaxies that are all gravitationally bound
together. So you can see all of these sort of yellow fuzzy galaxies here. They're all very
close to each other. And all of these are sort of glued together by their mutual gravity. So,
the force of gravity is pulling each galaxy towards each other galaxy and
really sticking them together. You can kind of think of these like almost cities of galaxies,
since there are so many of them that are living in such close proximity. This cluster was observed
as part of the Hubble Frontier Fields program. That program aimed to image six galaxy clusters
with some of the deepest Hubble observations of a galaxy cluster that have ever been taken. These
are incredibly deep images. These are some of the deepest images that we've ever had. Overall, the
goal was to really sort of understand the deepest physics of how these galaxy clusters are acting
as gravitational lenses, uncover what the dark matter within these galaxy clusters are doing,
and then get a really great look at the galaxies behind the cluster. So you can see there are a
lot of galaxies in this image that are sort of stretched into these little blue arcs. These are
all gravitationally lensed galaxies, so they're being magnified by the gravity of this massive
galaxy cluster. And so that gives us a chance to see sort of smaller, fainter objects that
would otherwise be completely invisible without the aid of this cosmic telescope. And just like
a glass lens, it collects a lot more light and focuses it back to our telescopes. So we're able
to see much fainter galaxies than we otherwise would be able to without the aid of gravitational
lensing. This really gives us a huge boost at being able to see sort of the smallest,
faintest objects in the distant universe. With this particular galaxy cluster,
you're able to see galaxies that are as far back as about 12 billion years ago. So we're really
pushing back to sort of the early days of the universe. Overall, the age of the universe now
is about 13.8 billion years. So 12 billion years is sort of the early stages of when
these galaxies would have been forming.
Abell 2744
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