Pan across Abell 370

This video pans across the massive galaxy cluster Abell 370. The cluster was already observed for Hubble’s Frontier Fields programme and now also became the target of the new BUFFALO (Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields And Legacy Observations) survey.

The huge mass of the cluster bends the light from more distant objects, creating distorted and magnified images of them. This allows astronomers to calculate the total mass of the cluster — both normal matter and dark matter — and to investigate objects in the early Universe that would be otherwise too faint and tiny for Hubble to see.

The additional observations from the BUFFALO survey create a wider field of view, allowing astronomers to create better models on the mass of the cluster and to detect more distant galaxies.