Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Gravity is so much a part of our daily lives that it is all too easy
to forget its awesome power — but on a galactic scale, its power becomes
both strikingly clear and visually stunning.
This image was taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and shows an object named SDSS J1138+2754. It acts as a gravitational lens illustrates the true strength of gravity: A large mass — a galaxy cluster
in this case — is creating such a strong gravitational field that it is
bending the very fabric of its surroundings. This causes the
billion-year-old light from galaxies sitting behind it to travel along
distorted, curved paths, transforming the familiar shapes of spirals and
ellipticals (visible in other parts of the image) into long, smudged
arcs and scattered dashes.
Some distant galaxies even appear multiple times in this image. Since
galaxies are wide objects, light from one side of the galaxy passes
through the gravitational lens differently than light from the other
side. When the galaxies’ light reaches Earth it can appear reflected, as
seen with the galaxy on the lower left part of the lens, or distorted,
as seen with the galaxy to the upper right.
This data were taken as part of a research project on star formation
in the distant Universe, building on Hubble’s extensive legacy of
deep-field images. Hubble observed 73 gravitationally-lensed galaxies
for this project.
Source: ESA/Hubble/Potw
