esahubble_opo1208a February 8th, 2012
Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Rigby (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), K. Sharon (Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago), and M. Gladders and E. Wuyts (University of Chicago)
Thanks to the presence of a natural "zoom lens" in space, this is a close-up look at the brightest distant "magnified" galaxy in the Universe known to date. It is one of the most striking examples of gravitational lensing, where the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy bends and amplifies the light of a more distant background galaxy. In this image the light from a distant galaxy, nearly 10 billion light-years away, has been warped into a nearly 90-degree arc of light in the galaxy cluster RCS2032727-132623. The galaxy cluster lies 5 billion light-years away. The background galaxy's image is over three times brighter than typically lensed galaxies. The natural-colour image was taken in March 2011 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3.
Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA
Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo1208a/
Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany
Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Telescope | Spectral Band | Wavelength | |
---|---|---|---|
Hubble (WFC3) | Infrared (H) | 1.6 µm | |
Hubble (WFC3) | Infrared (Redshifted Paschen b) | 1.3 µm | |
Hubble (WFC3) | Infrared (J) | 1.3 µm | |
Hubble (WFC3) | Optical (Z) | 986.0 nm | |
Hubble (WFC3) | Optical (I) | 814.0 nm | |
Hubble (WFC3) | Optical (V) | 606.0 nm | |
Hubble (WFC3) | Optical (C) | 390.0 nm | |
Detailed color mapping information coming soon...
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