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Cosmic Zoom Lens

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NASA

Mar 23, 2008
Image Article
Hubble space telescope image of deep field showing galaxies
A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies is seemingly caught in a spider web of distorted background galaxies in the left-hand image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The gravity of the cluster's trillion stars acts as a cosmic "zoom lens," bending and magnifying the light of the galaxies far behind it.

A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies is seemingly caught in a spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies in the left-hand image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
The gravity of the cluster’s trillion stars acts as a cosmic “zoom lens,” bending and magnifying the light of the galaxies located far behind it, a technique called gravitational lensing. The faraway galaxies appear in the Hubble image as arc-shaped objects around the cluster, named Abell 1689. The increased magnification allows astronomers to study remote galaxies in greater detail.Image Credit: NASA; ESA; L. Bradley (Johns Hopkins University); R. Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz); H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University); and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz)