NASA’s Great Observatories Team up and Begin Deepest Ever Probe of Universe

NASA plans to combine the prowess of three major space telescopes to look for hidden celestial objects in the Universe. This collaborative program will continue the deepest-ever hunt of the Universe for the next three years.

The space agency announced Thursday that it plans to team-up its great observatories namely Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes to look deeper into the universe than ever before. The observatories will uncover galaxies that are 100 times dimmer than what the three space telescopes can normally see.

With the help of this collaborative program called 'The Frontier Field', astronomers hope to reveal the populations of the galaxies that were present when the universe was just a few hundred million years old.

"The Frontier Fields program is exactly what NASA's great observatories were designed to do; working together to unravel the mysteries of the Universe" John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement. "Each observatory collects images using different wavelengths of light with the result that we get a much deeper understanding of the underlying physics of these celestial objects."

The astronomers will kick-start this program by observing six massive galaxy clusters. Astronomers will not just observe what is present within the cluster but also what is beyond them. They plan to use a natural phenomena gravitational lensing for their observations.

The clusters are the largest source of matter in the Universe and their gravitational fields can be used to "brighten and magnify more distant galaxies so they can be observed," the agency said.

"The idea is to use nature's natural telescopes in combination with the great observatories to look much deeper than before and find the most distant and faint galaxies we can possibly see," said Jennifer Lotz, a principal investigator with the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md.

Data provided by Hubble and Spitzer space telescope will be used to measure the masses of the galaxies and even their distances.  The other space telescope Chandra X-ray Observatory will look closely into the star field and will image the clusters using X-ray wavelengths to determine their mass and measure their gravitational lensing power. Apart from this, the observatory will also spot the background galaxies that have supermassive black holes.

The high-resolution data provided by Hubble will be used to distribution of dark matter within the six massive foreground clusters.

Peter Capak, the Spitzer principal investigator for the Frontier Fields program concluded saying, "We want to understand when and how the first stars and galaxies formed in the universe, and each great observatory gives us a different piece of the puzzle. Hubble tells you which galaxies to look at and how many stars are being born in those systems. Spitzer tells you how old the galaxy is and how many stars have formed."