UKZN astronomers make new breakthroughs in measuring galaxies

The University of KwaZulu-Natal is celebrating two of its astronomers making groundbreaking discoveries based on data collected by the Hubble Telescope.

The discoveries were made by researchers at the university's Astrophysics and Cosmology Research Unit (ACRU).

The more mass a galaxy has, the more it distorts space around it - a bit like looking through a piece of warped glass.

PhD student Miss Kenda Knowles discovered this lensing effect can also make it so that if it is big enough, this can in turn make objects appear several times in one image, though at different magnifications.

This discovery got the student onto a team lead by Dr Mathilde Jauzac which managed to measure the mass of a merging galaxy cluster called MACSJ0416 to the highest degree of precision yet.

“By using ultra-deep Hubble Space Telescope images we were able to discover "faint" (distant) background galaxies that are gravitationally lensed by the cluster, and thus magnified. The amount of magnification shows us what is happening in the cluster, and, as some of the most distant objects known, they are interesting in themselves, since they help us to understand the environment of the distant Universe.” Jauzac said.

In astrophysics you can't really measure how much mass an object has directly, they're pretty far away and pretty big - so the mass has to be figured out using indirect means.

Thanks to the world of Jauzac and Knowles, that can be done more accurately, giving us a better idea of the universe.

"Jauzac and Knowles, along with their international collaboration, will continue their work by studying the five other galaxy clusters that are scheduled to be observed during the next segment of the HFF initiative," the university said in a statement.