New snaps show dazzling young galaxies furiously spawning stars - 13 BILLION years ago The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the deepest image ever made of any cluster of galaxies, spying some of the youngest galaxies ever detected in space, including four bright young things as they appeared 13 billion years ago. Long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image of massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (foreground) and …
Lens flare is not related to whether there is atmosphere or not, though atmosphere could contribute to the effect of flaring in certain circumstances.
The spikes you can see, in some of the images are caused by the internal optics of the mirror assembly. (http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/nuts_.and._bolts/optics/) It is a Ritchey-Chretien Cassegrain design. Plenty of Hubble images show these spikes. They are usually prevalent in mirror configurations where the secondary mirrors are held in place by vanes. Newtownian reflectors are a good example. (http://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/BILDER/shop/GSO/Dobsons/GSD250C/GSD250C_FSStreben.jpg)
Warning: *supposition* The ghostly glow, around the stars that are the subject of the article is, IMHO, most likely a combination of the glow of the gasses that are being pulled in by the newly forming stars. and that this is so distant from Hubble there probably is a lot of interstellar gasses that can interfere with the image and is amplified by the amount of image processing required.
I could be completely off though. All I know it they are far better seeing conditions than I ever get in this fog ridden humidity bowl I live in, to the chagrin of my Dob.
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"but Hubble was able to find them through gravitational lensing"
How incredibly freaking awesome is it that we're at a point where that sentence can just be thrown out there, boom, just like that? A hundred years ago, just the most basic concepts involved were cutting edge at best, and we're sitting here USING A GALAXY AS A FUCKING TELESCOPE!!
That's just fucking balls-out goddamned awesome shit right there. We're LOOKING BACK IN TIME THROUGH A GRAVITY LENS! Stop and think about that for a minute, think about it in the context of your every day life, the physical and temporal scales involved... it's absolutely fucking brilliant. The guys doing this work - all of them, not just the ones doing the glamorous bit at the very end, mind you - ought to be heroes. No - we ought to be educating our kids enough so that they can understand what's involved in this as well as they can understand what's involved in football or entertainment. Then the science, and the scientists, will get some of the recognition they deserve for imaging the *beginning of time*.
I mean, I'm not normally an astronomy kinda guy - looking up at the sky has always scared the shit out of me; too much of nothing but still all of everything out there - but this is just fan-fucking-tastic.
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