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SDSS J0901 + 1814, a cluster of giant galaxies located 3.9 billion light years away in the constellation Cancer, is so massive that its gravity distorts and amplifies the light of a more distant galaxy.
This Hubble image shows the SDSS strong lens galaxy cluster J0901 + 1814. The star-forming lens galaxy LRG-3-817 is seen as a long arc to the left of the cluster’s central galaxy. The color image was taken from separate exposures taken in the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum with the Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Five filters were used to sample different wavelengths. Color results from assigning different tints to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image Credit: Hubble / ESA / NASA / S. Allam et al.
Galaxy clusters contain thousands of galaxies of all ages, shapes and sizes. Typically, they have a mass of about a trillion times the mass of the Sun and form over billions of years as smaller clusters of galaxies slowly come together.
Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity that massive objects would distort the fabric of space itself.
When light passes in front of one of these objects, like a huge cluster of galaxies, its path changes slightly.
Called the gravitational lens, this effect is only visible in rare cases and only the best telescopes in the world can observe the associated phenomena.
“Strong gravitational lenses provide an opportunity to study the properties of distant galaxies, because Hubble can resolve the details in the multiple arcs that are one of the main results of the gravitational lens,” Hubble astronomers said.
“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 lens phenomenon produced a distorted image of the background galaxy.
The lens object is an almost face-to-face star-forming galaxy located 10.8 billion light years from Earth.
Named LRG 3-817, it is seen as a long arc to the left of the central galaxy of SDSS J0901 + 1814.
The galaxy was discovered as part of the Sloan Bright Arcs Survey, which uncovered some of the brightest gravitational lensed high redshift galaxies in the night sky.
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