Large numbers of unusually bright images in the far-IR which appear to be galaxies magnified by gravitational lenses in
newly released data from the Herschel-ATLAS project
“Our survey of the sky looks for sources of sub-millimeter light. The big breakthrough is that we have discovered that many of the brightest sources are being magnified by lenses, which means that we no longer have to rely on the rather inefficient methods of finding lenses which are used at visible and radio wavelengths,” says lead researcher Mattia Negrello of the Open University.
Negrello says that “…Our results show that gravitational lensing is at work in not just a few, but in all of the distant and bright galaxies seen by Herschel.”