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heic1319 - Science Release

Most distant gravitational lens helps weigh galaxies

but deepens a galactic mystery

17 October 2013

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An international team of astronomers has found the most distant gravitational lens yet — a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. The discovery provides a rare opportunity to directly measure the mass of a distant galaxy. But it also poses a mystery: lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare. Given this and other recent finds, astronomers either have been phenomenally lucky — or, more likely, they have underestimated substantially the number of small, very young galaxies in the early Universe....LEIA MAIS/READ MORE