Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2016

SPACE CHRONICLES using the world’s most powerful telescope, the team relied on gravi- tational lensing to see the incredibly faint object born just after the Big Bang. The team detected the galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago, or when the Universe was a toddler on a cosmic time scale. The detection was made using the DEIMOS instru- ment fitted on the ten-meter Keck II telescope, and was made possible through a phenomenon predicted by Einstein in which an object is magnified by the gravity of another object that is between it and the viewer. In this case, the detected gal- axy was behind the galaxy cluster MACS2129.4-0741, which is massive Faintest early-universe galaxy ever, detected and confirmed A n international team of scientists has detected and confirmed the faintest early- Universe galaxy ever using the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit on Maunakea, Hawaii. In addition to by Keck Observatory C olor image of the cluster taken with Hubble Space Tele- scope (im- ages in three different fil- ters were combined to make an RGB image). In the inset we show three spectra of the multiply imaged sys- tems. They have peaks at the same wavelength, hence show- ing that they belong to the same source. [Bra- dac/HST/W. M. Keck Ob- servatory]