The Hubble Space Telescope explores the ultimate boundary of the Frontier Fields Early Universe Galaxy, where galaxies and clusters come together.

The Hubble Space Telescope explores the ultimate boundary of the Frontier Fields Early Universe Galaxy, where galaxies and clusters come together.

The galaxy cluster Abell 370, located six billion light years away, has revealed previously unseen faint features thanks to the powerful gaze of the NASA/ESA Hubble Telescope.

Abell 370, located six billion light-years away in the constellation Cetus, is a cluster of hundreds of galaxies. In the 1980s, detailed images revealed that the luminous arc in the lower left of the cluster was not an internal structure, but rather a gravitationally lensed image of a galaxy twice as distant as the cluster. This arc is actually composed of two distorted images of a spiral galaxy behind the cluster.

The immense gravitational influence of Abell 370 causes the light from background galaxies to spread out, resulting in distorted and magnified appearances. This effect is visible as streaks and arcs curving around the center of the image. Massive galaxy clusters like Abell 370 act as natural telescopes, providing astronomers with a glimpse of the early Universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The image of Abell 370 was captured as part of the Frontier Fields program, utilizing a significant amount of Hubble observing time and orbits around the Earth. This program focused on six galaxy clusters, with Abell 370 being the final one to be completed. An earlier image of Abell 370 was published in 2009, but it lacked the faint details captured in this more recent image.

In addition to the cluster observations, Hubble also examined six "parallel fields" near the galaxy clusters. These regions were imaged with the same exposure times as the clusters themselves, using both infrared and visible light cameras.

The Frontier Fields initiative has yielded the most profound observations to date of galaxy clusters and the magnified galaxies situated behind them. These observations have proven invaluable in aiding astronomers in comprehending the emergence of stars and galaxies from the Universe's dark ages, a time when space was shrouded in darkness, impenetrable, and saturated with hydrogen.

The examination of colossal galaxy clusters, such as Abell 370, also contributes to the measurement of the distribution of both normal matter and dark matter within these clusters [heic1506]. Through the analysis of its lensing properties, astronomers have ascertained that Abell 370 encompasses two substantial, distinct clusters of dark matter, further substantiating the notion that this immense galaxy cluster is the outcome of the merger of two smaller clusters.

With the completion of the Frontier Fields program's observations, astronomers now possess the entire dataset to thoroughly investigate the clusters, their gravitational lensing effects, and the magnified galaxies from the early stages of the Universe.