Sunday, November 26, 2017

Across The Universe, Cont. - The Cosmic Snake


(click on image to enlarge)



From NASA/ESA, November 20, 2017: This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the Cosmic Snake, a distant galaxy peppered with clumpy regions of intense star formation that appear warped by the effect of gravitational lensing. This giant arc-like galaxy is actually behind the huge galaxy cluster MACSJ1206.2-0847, but thanks to the cluster’s gravity, we can see it from Earth.

Light from the distant, high-redshift galaxy arrives at Earth, having been distorted by the gigantic gravitational influence of the intervening cluster. Fascinatingly, instead of making it more difficult to perceive cosmological objects, such strong lensing effects improve the resolution and depth of an image by magnifying the background object. Sometimes gravitational lensing can even produce multiple images of the object as light is bent in different directions around the foreground cluster.

Using Hubble, astronomers recently looked at several such images of the Cosmic Snake, each with a different level of magnification. Using this technique, the galaxy and its features could be studied on different scales. The highest-resolution images revealed that giant clumps in high-redshift galaxies are made up of a complex substructure of smaller clumps, which contributes to our understanding of star formation in distant galaxies.

Credit: ESA Hubble/ NASA

4 comments:

Infidel753 said...

If only the great pioneers who helped us get where we are today, like Galileo and Newton, could have lived to see such things! They would have been fascinated at the idea that gravity can bend light, to say nothing of how much else we've discovered.

W. Hackwhacker said...

Infidel - When you think about how much has happened in such a ridiculously compressed time -- the breakthroughs and the rapid acceleration of knowledge from discovery building on discovery -- it's really astounding. From decoding the human genome to space probes to supercomputers -- all unimaginable or the subject of fiction less than 100 years ago -- it's all happened literally in the space of a heartbeat in the history of man on the planet.

DivaNewYork said...

Another beautiful Monday morning. Have a happy one, Hackie!

W. Hackwhacker said...

And you, too, Diva!