Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble, and A. Gonzalez (University of Florida, Gainesville, USA), A. Stanford (University of California, Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA) and M. Brodwin (University of Missouri-Kansas City and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA).

Seeing is believing, except when you don't believe what you see. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a puzzling arc of light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away. The galactic grouping, discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, was observed when the universe was roughly a quarter of its current age of 13.7 billion years. The giant arc is the stretched shape of a more distant galaxy whose light is distorted by the monster cluster's powerful gravity, an effect called gravitational lensing. The trouble is, the arc shouldn't exist.

Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA

Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo1219c/

Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, None, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License