[ad_1]
SDSS J0901 + 1814, a gigantic cluster of galaxies located 3.9 billion light-years away in the constellation Cancer, is so massive that its gravity distorts and magnifies the light from a more distant starburst galaxy.
This Hubble image shows the strong lens galactic cluster SDSS J0901 + 1814. The lens star-forming galaxy LRG-3-817 is seen as a long arc to the left of the cluster’s central galaxy. The color image was obtained from separate exposures taken in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Five filters were used to sample various wavelengths. Color results from assigning different shades to each monochrome image associated with a single filter. Image credit: Hubble / ESA / NASA / S. Allam et al.
Galactic clusters contain thousands of galaxies of all ages, shapes and sizes. Typically, they have a mass of about one million trillion times the mass of the Sun and form over billions of years as smaller groups of galaxies slowly come together.
Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity that massive objects will deform the fabric of space itself.
When light passes through one of these objects, such as a huge cluster of galaxies, its path changes slightly.
Called a gravitational lens, this effect is only visible in rare cases, and only the best telescopes in the world can observe related phenomena.
“Strong gravitational lenses provide an opportunity to study the properties of distant galaxies, as Hubble can resolve the details within the multiple arcs that are one of the major achievements of the gravitational lens,” said the Hubble astronomers.
“An important consequence of lens distortion is magnification, which allows us to observe objects that would otherwise be too far away and too faint to be seen.”
In the new Hubble photo, the strong crystalline phenomenon produced a distorted image of the background galaxy.
The lensed object is a near-frontal star-forming galaxy located 10.8 billion light-years from Earth.
Called LRG 3-817, it is seen as a long arc to the left of the central galaxy of SDSS J0901 + 1814.
The galaxy was found as part of the Sloan Bright Arcs Survey, which discovered some of the brightest gravitational-lensed high redshift galaxies in the night sky.
Source link
