Looking Through a Giant Magnifying Glass When taken to the extreme, gravity can create some intriguing visual effects that the Hubble Space Telescope is well suited to observing. Einstein’s general theory of relativity describes how mass concentrations distort the space around them. A gravitational
, located about 4 billion light-years away, contains an astounding assortment of several hundred galaxies tied together by the mutual pull of gravity. Entangled among the galaxies are mysterious-looking arcs of blue light. These are actually distorted images of remote galaxies behind the cluster. These far-flung galaxies are too faint for Hubble to see directly.
The gravity of a luminous red galaxy has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy. More typically, such light bending results in two discernible images of the distant galaxy, but here the lens alignment is so precise that the background galaxy is distorted into a horseshoe – a nearly complete ring. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
More complex gravitational lensing arises in observations of massive clusters of galaxies. While the distribution of matter in a galaxy cluster generally does have a center, it is never circularly symmetric and can be significantly lumpy. Background galaxies are lensed by the cluster and their images often appear as short, thin “lensed arcs” around the outskirts of the cluster.
On the left is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17. On the right is the same image overlaid with a map of the cluster’s mass distribution. The ring-like structure evident in the map is one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date for the existence of dark matter. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. J. Jee and H. Ford
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