Peering through a giant cosmic magnifying glass, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has spotted one of the farthest, faintest, and smallest galaxies ever seen. The diminutive object is estimated to be over 13 billion light-years away.
This new detection is considered one of the most reliable distance measurements of a galaxy that existed in the early universe, said the Hubble researchers. They used two independent methods to estimate its distance.

The galaxy was detected as part of the Frontier Fields program, an ambitious three-year effort, begun in 2013, that teams Hubble with NASA’s other Great Observatories — the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory — to probe the early universe by studying large galaxy clusters. These clusters are so massive that their gravity deflects light passing through them, magnifying, brightening, and distorting background objects in a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. These powerful lenses allow astronomers to find many dim, distant structures that otherwise might be too faint to see.
Please join +Tony Darnell Dr +Carol Christian  and +Scott Lewis as we talk with the Principal Investigators of this exciting discovery.

Bring your questions and comments and we’ll read them on air throughout the hangout!

Read more here:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/39/

*Special Note*

Our own Dr. +Jason Kalirai has been nominated for a Listener Choice Award for an audio segment on Exploring Exoplanets released last July.

Please show your support for the #JWST mission by listening to his segment here

Jason Kalirai, Johns Hopkins University – Exploring Exoplanets

and voting here:
 http://academicminute.org/2014/11/listener_choice_award/

A scientific visualization of a black hole passing through Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

This scientific visualization demonstrates the visual distortion known as gravitational lensing. A black hole, with roughly the mass of the planet Saturn, is imagined to pass over the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, MD. The view of the buildings on the far side of the harbor are distorted using the calculated effects of Einstein’s general relativity.

A black hole warps the space around it. Light that passes near a black hole will follow curved paths and can create multiple images and other visual artifacts. Note that the sky can sometimes be seen by looking below the black hole. These distortions are similar to what can be produced using glass lenses, and are produced by similar optics equations. The effects are called gravitational lensing – lensing that redirects light using mass instead of glass.

The calculations for the visualization use a planar approximation that assumes the buildings are all at the same distance, but are otherwise accurate. Note also that foreground objects, like the boat mast, were not isolated and removed from the image before distortion. In a fully accurate visualization, foreground objects would not be distorted.

For more information or to download this video, visit: http://hubblesite.org/videos/video_details/25-a-black-hole-visits-baltimore

For more videos, visit: http://hubblesite.org/videos/