Gravitational Licensing

GS-III: Gravitational Licensing

Context

Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope as a sort of time machine, researchers plan to investigate how new stars are born.

For this, they will take the help of a natural phenomenon called “gravitational lensing”.

How it Works?

The phenomenon occurs when a huge amount of matter, such as a massive galaxy or cluster of galaxies, creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from objects behind it, but in the same line of sight, NASA explained on its website.
In effect, these are natural, cosmic telescopes they are called gravitational lenses. These large celestial objects will magnify the light from distant galaxies that are at or near the peak of star formation. The effect allows researchers to study the details of early galaxies too far away to be seen otherwise with even the most powerful space telescopes

Targeting Extremely Magnified Panchromatic Lensed Arcs and Their Extended Star Formation:

The Milky Way today forms the equivalent of one Sun every year, but in the past, that rate was up to 100 times greater.
NASA now plans to look billions of years into the past in order to understand how our Sun formed.
The programme is called Targeting Extremely Magnified Panchromatic Lensed Arcs and Their Extended Star Formation, or TEMPLATES.

Source: Indian Express

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