BUFFALO is on the news!
Inspired by the successful Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) program, our new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observing campaign, called Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields And Legacy Observations or BUFFALO, has been assigned 101 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope. The program comprises an international team of astronomers, led jointly by Durham and the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark (PIs: Dr Charles Steinhardt & Dr Mathilde Jauzac).
BUFFALO is dedicated to enlarging the sky area covered by the six Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) that focused on very rich galaxy clusters, originally with the aim of exploiting their gravitational fields as "cosmic telescopes" to study very distant galaxies in unprecedented detail. BUFFALLO expands the are covered by about 4 times, allowing astronomers to map with more fidelity the total mass distribution (both ordinary and dark matter) of these 6 massive galaxy clusters in order to learn more about their evolution and about the nature of the mysterious dark matter.
BUFFALO is also set to investigate how and when the most massive and luminous galaxies in the Universe formed and how early galaxy formation is linked to the gravitational assembly of the dark matter that was one of the first major events after the Big Bang.
This program will pave the way for observations with the upcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, as well as current and future ground-based telescopes.
Check also the official press releases here:
https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1816/
http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-39
https://www.dur.ac.uk/research/news/item/?itemno=35636
