The CANDELS project

The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) is a powerful survey of the distant universe being carried out with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The largest project in the history of Hubble, it has been allocated a combined exposure time of 4 months. CANDELS uses to instruments aboard the HST: the near-infrared WFC3 camera and the visible-light ACS camera. Jointly, these two cameras give unprecedented coverage of galaxies from optical wavelengths to the near-infrared.

This will allow CANDELS to study different stages in the formation of galaxies, from the first billion years of cosmic evolution to the present. In addition, CANDELS is set to explore the properties of Dark Energy, the little-understood cosmic ingredient responsible for the acceleration of cosmic expansion, by measuring the brightness of supernovae of type Ia – continuing work for which CANDELS team member Adam Riess, who is also a co-author of the present work, was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for physics.

MP/HOR

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