Wednesday, August 19, 2009

abell } 2218



this galaxy cluster bends and magnifies light in a process called gravitational lensing. as a result, astronomers have been able to increase the power of earth and space telescopes enough to see redshift-10 galaxies, galaxies that formed shortly after the dark ages of the universe, galaxies that "may have kicked off the subsequent phase of reionization, in which ultraviolet starlight stripped electrons from hydrogen gas," causing galaxies to grow larger than the earliest galaxies (because reionized hydrogen "would have been too hot to clump together").

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