[innerSpaceman]

That's darn cool, alright.

Ok, here's something you will sooooo not see with your binoculars, but it's space science news I learned earlier this week that I've been dying to geek out about ... and this appears to be the perfect opening.

Albert Einstein turns out to have been right with his prediction that massive gravitational objects would warp space itself, creating visual distortions that can act as magnifying lenses. Through telescopes aimed at huge clusters of galaxies, this amazing cosmic effect of
M A G N I F I C A T I O N
has allowed scientists to finally see a gajillion times further into space and backwards into time than would ever remotely be possible with the current state of terrestrial telescopes.

What they have found are distorted images of the universe's first batch of galaxies from 13.7 billion years ago. A fascinating time in our local universe when the Dark Ages came to an end. Total darkness had existed in the young universe, from the time it was about 400,000 years old, and things had cooled to about sun-surface temperatures, and the first atoms could form. But the mysterious "dark matter" far outweighed the new "real" matter. It took another 200 million years for the first cycle of mega-stars to ignite, die-off, and create the first normal stars to form the first recognizable galaxies.

These are what we can now see because gravity warps space itself into windows where we can peer through the very fabric of time ... and see the world through eyes which we are perhaps not fit to gaze with.




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