A team of astronomers managed to look extremely far out in space and spotted a supermassive galaxy thanks to a cosmic lens.
Authors of a study published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters detailed a galaxy called SDP.81, which sits 11.7 billion light years from Earth. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, the astronomers saw SDP.81 with a natural gravitational lens some 3.4 billion light years out.
According to a press release from the National Institute of Natural Sciences (NINA), ALMA spotted SDP.81 in Oct. 2014.
"A gravitational lens created by a massive foreground galaxy 3.4 billion light-years from us acts as a natural telescope, magnifying the image of SDP.81," NINA's release stated. "The image becomes brighter but smears into a ring shape, as can be seen in Figure 1. This ultra-sharp image of the ring astounded astronomers around the globe, but it has been difficult to understand the details of its complicated structure."
But since Earth's telescopes and their space-based counterparts can only be so powerful, these natural lenses are the key factor in making deep space observations.
"ALMA was designed to be the most powerful telescope of its kind, but by harnessing the magnifying power of this gravitational lens we were able to study a distant and mysterious object in detail that would have been impossible otherwise," study co-author Todd Hunter, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, said in a press release. "This one dataset has spawned an entire series of highly intriguing research, confirming that ALMA offers the astronomical community new avenues to probe the distant Universe."
