Hubble Space Telescope has many tricks up its sleeve, and it used one of them to enable astronomers to spy deeper into the depths of the universe. The space telescope used a phenomenon called gravitational lensing to capture four bright points of galaxies forming a ring.
There are actually two galaxies along with a very distant quasar, which is an extremely bright center of a galaxy. This effect occurs when two galaxies are closer to Earth act as a magnifier on the quasar dubbed 2M1310-1714, which is said to be located 17 billion light-years from Earth. These galaxies have huge mass causing their gravity to bend the light rays coming from the quasar, making the quasar more clearly visible to us.
Gravitational lensing important for exploration
It’s the bending of light that makes it appear that there are four points of light around the two galaxies when in reality there’s only one quasar, the light from which is warped to make it appear like there are four sources of light.
Gravitational lensing might be visually confusing, but it can be a great tool to hunt distant objects. It enables astronomers to observe farther out and might even come in handy to study dark matter. A version of this method, known as microlensing will be used by the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to hunt distant exoplanets by observing the way the light bends when one star passes in front of another.
Hubble chronicling the cosmos
Previously, Hubble Space captured the galaxy NGC 1385, which is around 68 million light-years away from our planet in the Fornax constellation, which means “furnace” in Latin. The legendary telescope has been clicking mesmerizing images of the cosmos for three decades.
The space telescope snapped a cosmic event where three galaxies are interacting with each other or as NASA calls it “squabbling galactic siblings.” ESA explains the image shows a “dramatic triplet of galaxies” engaged in a “three-way gravitational tug-of-war.” The system is called Arp 195, named after astronomer Halton Arp. Hubble Space Telescope returned to action after a month-long hiatus after it went into safe mode in June.
