The BUFFALO survey is planned to take place over the course of 101 Hubble orbits - amounting to around 160 hours of observing time with the telescope. ![]() "Plus, BUFFALO will allow us to map precisely the distribution of dark matter in these massive clusters, and thus trace their evolutionary history, a missing piece of information in today's evolution theories." "By expanding the area that we map around each of these clusters, we will significantly improve our estimate of the clusters' magnification, a mandatory step for studying the distant galaxies that BUFFALO will discover," said astrophysicist Mathilde Jauzac of Durham University's Center for Extragalactic Astronomy. Stronger lensing means stronger gravity, and once the gravity of the galaxies in the field has been subtracted, what's left is dark matter. This is something the lensing can also help with. The first step will be mapping that dark matter. And the dimmer, yellower galaxies are older, with ageing star populations. The bluer ones are smaller, spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, with younger populations of stars. The brightest yellowish white ones are huge, containing hundreds of billions of stars. In the image, you can see the galaxies in Abell 370. Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields And Legacy Observations ( BUFFALO) is going to peer deeper into the six regions studied by the Hubble Space Telescope in the earlier Frontier Fields survey by focusing on galaxy clusters to see what's behind them. This is the effect being exploited by a new survey. ![]() In the case of Abell 370, the lensing effect is so strong that it can reveal galaxies not even Hubble's sensitive long-range instruments would be able to glimpse. The higher the mass, the stronger the lens. ![]() Abell 370 is the first of these clusters.Īny object with significant mass can create a gravitational lens astronomers can work with.
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