The Hubble Space Telescope, run by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), has caught sight of something spectacular happening way out in the cosmos.
In the constellation Canes Venatici, about eight billion light-years away from Earth, a group of at least two galaxy clusters is joining forces to form a single, giant cluster.
This massive combination is turning into a ‘gravitational lens’, or as astronomers like to call it, a ‘cosmic monster’.
What’s a gravitational lens, you ask? Well, it’s all thanks to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
According to his theory, really heavy objects like galaxy clusters can actually distort the fabric of space and time. When this happens, they bend the path of light just like a giant cosmic magnifying glass.
This lets astronomers see objects that are incredibly faint and far away. It can also mess with the images of galaxies behind the lens, stretching them into streaks of light.
We can already see signs of this happening in the images of eMACS J1353.7+4329, the galaxy cluster that Hubble is observing.
The observations of this celestial event are part of a project fittingly named “Monsters in the Making”.
This project used two of Hubble’s tools, the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, to watch five amazing galaxy clusters in different wavelengths (kind of like changing the color filter on your camera).
The astronomers conducting this study hope that their work will pave the way for future observations using even more advanced telescopes, like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope run by NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
This new generation of telescopes will help us uncover even more secrets about these fascinating cosmic ‘monsters’.
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