The photometric catalogs of these six clusters and their parallel fields can be found here.
Considered to be the birthplace of space-based telescope observation, the Hubble Space Telescope has marked a significant milestone in the world’s ever so constant endeavor of looking at and understanding the skies. With it, we can look farther and better than we have ever been able to, reaching to further than 450 million years after the Big Bang. Though nothing is without its limitations, nature has an interesting way of surprising and helping us in our understanding of the universe.
The Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) project has been commissioned in an effort to look further than ever before–giving us a glimpse into the era of the James Webb telescope. The motivation behind this project is the implication lensing has on the magnification of light. Six HFF clusters have been chosen with careful criteria: 1) that light from bright stars does not overshadow the faint objects we use to probe the young Universe, and 2) selecting areas where follow-up observation can be done. These massive clusters distort and magnify the light in its background. Because of this magnification, we can probe beyond HST’s technical limitations in order to study our early universe.
The Hubble Space Telescope will also probe six parallel fields to perform comparison measurements with these clusters. This past year, I have been working on creating catalogs for these clusters, extracting photometry and redshifts, along with some intrinsic properties like star formation rates, luminosities, and masses.
