Close-up of hidden galaxies with new cosmic zoom lenses

Astronomers have discovered a new way of locating a natural phenomenon that acts like a zoom lens and allows astronomers to peer at galaxies in the distant and early Universe. These results are from the very first data taken as part of the "Herschel-ATLAS" project, the largest imaging survey conducted so far with the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, and are published in the journal Science.

The magnification allows astronomers to see galaxies otherwise hidden from us when the Universe was only a few billion years old. This provides key insights into how galaxies have changed over the history of the cosmos.

Dr Loretta Dunne from the School of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Nottingham is joint-leader of the Herschel-ATLAS survey. Dr Dunne said: "What we've seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Wide area surveys are essential for finding these rare events and since Herschel has only covered one thirtieth of the entire Herschel-ATLAS area so far, we expect to discover hundreds of lenses once we have all the data. Once found, we can probe the early Universe on the same physical scales as we can in galaxies next door.

"The data from the area of sky used for this work has now been released to the astronomical community and we hope that now astronomers not directly involved in H-ATLAS will dive into this data set and exploit the wealth of science which is bursting to be done with it."

A century ago Albert Einstein showed that gravity can cause light to bend. The effect is normally extremely small, and it is only when light passes close to a very massive object such as a galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars that the results become easily noticeable. When light from a very distant object passes a galaxy much closer to us, its path can be bent in such a way that the image of the distant galaxy is magnified and distorted. These alignment events are called "gravitational lenses" and many have been discovered over recent decades, mainly at visible and radio wavelengths.

As with a normal glass lens the alignment is crucial, requiring the position of the lens -- in this case a galaxy -- to be just right. This is very rare and astronomers have to rely on chance alignments, often involving sifting through large amounts of data from telescopes. Most methods of searching for gravitational lenses have a very poor success rate with fewer than one in 10 candidates typically being found to be real.

Herschel looks at far-infrared light, which is emitted not by stars, but by the gas and dust from which they form. Its panoramic imaging cameras have allowed astronomers to find examples of these lenses by scanning large areas of the sky in far-infrared and sub-millimetre light.

Dr Mattia Negrello, of the Open University and lead researcher of the study, said: "Our survey of the sky looks for sources of sub-millimetre light. The big breakthrough is that we have discovered that many of the brightest sources are being magnified by lenses, which means that we no longer have to rely on the rather inefficient methods of finding lenses which are used at visible and radio wavelengths."

The Herschel-ATLAS images contain thousands of galaxies, most so far away that the light has taken billions of years to reach us. Dr Negrello and his team investigated five surprisingly bright objects in this small patch of sky. Looking at the positions of these bright objects with optical telescopes on the Earth, they found galaxies that would not normally be bright at the far-infrared wavelengths observed by Herschel. This led them to suspect that the galaxies seen in visible light might be gravitational lenses magnifying much more distant galaxies seen by Herschel.

To find the true distances to the Herschel sources, Negrello and his team looked for a tell-tale signature of molecular gas. Using radio and sub-millimetre telescopes on the ground, they showed that this signature implies the galaxies are being seen as they were when the Universe was just 2-4 billion years old -- less than a third of its current age. The galaxies seen by the optical telescopes are much closer, each ideally positioned to create a gravitational lens. Dr Negrello commented that "previous searches for magnified galaxies have targeted clusters of galaxies where the huge mass of the cluster makes the gravitational lensing effect unavoidable. Our results show that gravitational lensing is at work in not just a few, but in all of the distant and bright galaxies seen by Herschel."

The magnification provided by these cosmic zoom lenses allows astronomers to study much fainter galaxies, and in more detail than would otherwise be possible. They are the key to understanding how the building blocks of the Universe have changed since they were in their infancy. Professor Rob Ivison of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, part of the team that created the images, said "This relatively simple technique promises to unlock the secrets of how galaxies like our Milky Way formed and evolved. Not only does the lensing allow us to find them very efficiently, but it helps us peer within them to figure out how the individual pieces of the jigsaw came together, back in the mists of time."

Professor Steve Eales from Cardiff University and the other leader of the survey added: "We can also use this technique to study the lenses themselves. This is exciting because 80 per cent of the matter in the Universe is thought to be dark matter, which does not absorb, reflect or emit light and so can't be seen directly with our telescopes. With the large number of gravitational lenses that we'll get from our full survey, we'll really be able to get to grips with this hidden Universe."

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Enigma of missing stars in local group of galaxies may be solved

In the local group of galaxies that also includes the Andromeda Nebula and our Milky Way, there are about 100 billion stars. According to astronomers' calculations, there should be many more. Now, physicists from the University of Bonn and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland may have found an explanation for this discrepancy.

Their study will appear in the upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

New stars are born in the Universe around the clock -- on the Milky Way, currently about ten per year. From the birth rate in the past, we can generally calculate how populated space should actually be. But the problem is that the results of such calculations do not match our actual observations. "There should actually be a lot more stars that we can see," says Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg, astrophysicist at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie of the University of Bonn.

So, where are those stars?

For years, astronomers worldwide have been looking for a plausible explanation for this discrepancy. In cooperation with Dr. Carsten Weidner from St. Andrews University, Dr. Pflamm-Altenburg and Professor Dr. Pavel Kroupa, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Bonn, may now have found the solution. It seems that so far, the birth rate has simply been overestimated. But this answer is not quite as simple as it sounds. Apparently, the error of estimation only occurs during periods of particularly high star production.

The reason for this lies in the manner in which astronomers calculate the birth rate. "For the local Universe -- i.e., the Milky Way as our home and the adjacent galaxies -- it is relatively simple," explains Professor Kroupa. "Here we are able to count the young stars one by one, using huge telescopes."

The problem with this method is that it only works for our immediate vicinity. But many galaxies are so distant that even the best telescope simply overlooks their small stars. As luck would have it, however, occasionally there is an especially large whopper among the newbie's in the sky. Such a star will, even if it cannot be directly discovered as an individual star, leave its traces in the light of even the farthest galaxies. The number of large whoppers then determines the strength of this trace.

In our immediate vicinity, these large whoppers occur with a fixed probability. There are always about 300 lightweights to one "big star baby." This numerical ratio seemed to be universal. So it was sufficient for astronomers to know the number of the large whoppers, for this allowed them to determine the number of new-born stars by simply multiplying the former number by a factor of 300.

Population explosion in space

Recently, however, some Bonn astronomers around Professor Kroupa began doubting the fixed ratio. Their hypothesis is that at times when the galactic nurseries are booming, they generate a considerably higher number of stellar heavies than normal. The reason for this, according to this theory, is so-called stellar crowding. For stars are not single children; they are born in groups, as so-called star clusters. At birth, these clusters are always of a similar size -- no matter whether they contain 100 star embryos -- or 100,000.

Consequently, at times of a high birth rate, space can be at a premium in star clusters. Astronomers call such galaxies that are particularly rich in mass "ultra-compact dwarf galaxies," or UCD's for short. In these, things are so tight that some of the young stars fuse during formation. Thus, more stars rich in mass than normal emerge. The "small to large" ratio is then only about 50 to 1. "In other words, we used to estimate the number of newly formed small stars by far too high," explains Dr. Carsten Weidner.

The researchers from Bonn and St. Andrews have now corrected the birth rates according to the projections of the stellar crowding theory. With an encouraging result -- they actually arrived at the number of stars that can be seen today.