1-1-13: SPACE GAZING!

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

SpaceRoundup-0101.mp3

The year 2013 is here. And during this year, astronomers will be seeing deeper into space than they ever have before.

The year 2012 saw a number of achievements. In January of last year, using the Hubble Space Telescope's Ultra Deep Field, we saw images of the earliest supernova ever, some 9 billion years ago. In August, another achievement, using a portion of the Ultra Deep Field called the eXtreme Deep Field: an image of the Universe that was 13.2 billion years old.

It’s hard to see these distant objects for a lot of reasons. One is the expansion of the universe – which, through the so-called "red shift," has moved what used to be visible light into the infrared part of the spectrum. Hubble's currently nearing the limits of what infrared light it can detect. But, scientists have come up with some ways to make it possible to see objects very, very far away. One method is called "gravitational lensing" -- and requires two telescopes to make it work. 

Dan Coe, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute, used this method  to find what was, in November, called the most distant galaxy ever seen. He tells us about "gravitational lensing" -- and how it can be used to find galaxies at the furthest reaches of what we can see into space.

Observations of distant celestial bodies weren't the only astronomical development of 2012... we also got analysis of what will happen to our galaxy, the Milky Way, in the future. Turns out, it's going to collide with the nearby Andromeda Galaxy.

Interested in finding out what's in the night sky in 2013? You can attend the Space Telescope Science Institute's public lecture series. You can also gaze skyward from the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg telescope.