Ok, so this one is a good few weeks old news wise, but still worthy of note.Dark matter, exoplanets, distant (and I mean distant) galaxies - all things that we can find through the observation of gravitational lensing effects way out there in the cosmos. This useful phenomena occurs when a light source is 'bent' around a sufficiently massive object in such a way as to focus the light towards the observer.
In the case of this recent study performed by a team of astronomers using the Hubble space telescope, these lenses were used to search for and catalogue galaxies so distant that without the focusing effect of gravitational lensing they would be virtually undetectable to us. In this way we can observe objects from the very early universe, which once studied, will enable the testing of current cosmological models.
Mmm, science.
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