Word: fainting
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Ordinarily, Ellis explains, you could never see small galaxies a mere 500 million years after the Big Bang; they're just too faint for any telescope now in existence. But the universe itself has supplied a way of boosting a telescope's magnifying power. The theory of relativity says massive objects warp the space around them, diverting light rays from their original path. In the 1930s Albert Einstein realized this meant a star, say, could act as a lens, distorting and amplifying the light from something behind it. In practice, he said, it probably happens so rarely that we will...
...revealed, among other things, the existence of tiny planets around stars thousands of light-years away and have created weird optical effects, including multiple images of faraway quasars. If you look at a massive cluster of galaxies, Ellis figured, you might see amplified images of more distant galaxies, too faint to be seen otherwise. So a year or two ago, he started aiming the Keck at galactic clusters, and along with Stark, he identified six candidate objects. To make certain that these were truly far away, the pair has come back to the Keck for a second, more intensive look...
...name in the online telescope log, he made a typo. Every time the focusing routine came upon it, the program froze. The typo has now been corrected. The Keck can focus again, and to their delight, Stark and Ellis are able to confirm that at least three of their faint galaxies do seem to lie hundreds of millions of light-years farther awayand hundreds of millions of years closer to the Big Bangthan anything ever seen before...
...cooled to about the temperature of the surface of the sun, allowing subatomic particles to combine for the first time into atoms. The last burst of light from the Big Bang shone forth at that time; it is still detectable today in the form of a faint whisper of microwaves streaming from all directions in space. The discovery of those microwaves in 1964 confirmed the existence of the Big Bang...
...this isn?t a restaurant model for the faint of heart - Kary is often working his land after dark, by his tractor?s headlights - and I wondered if the farm-to-table concept could work for any but the most elite places...