Zooming in on the early Universe

esahubble_potw1827a July 2nd, 2018

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, RELICS

This busy image is a treasure trove of wonders. Bright stars from the Milky Way sparkle in the foreground, the magnificent swirls of several spiral galaxies are visible across the frame, and a glowing assortment of objects at the centre make up a massive galaxy cluster. Such clusters are the biggest objects in the Universe that are held together by gravity, and can contain thousands of galaxies of all shapes and sizes. Typically, they have a mass of about one million billion times the mass of the Sun unimaginably huge! Their incredible mass makes clusters very useful natural tools to test theories in astronomy, such as Einsteins theory of general relativity. This tells us that objects with mass warp the fabric of spacetime around them; the more massive the object, the greater the distortion. An enormous galaxy cluster like this one therefore has a huge influence on the spacetime around it, even distorting the light from more distant galaxies to change a galaxys apparent shape, creating multiple images, and amplifying the galaxys light a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. This image was taken by Hubbles Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3 as part of an observing programme called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study.

Provider: Hubble Space Telescope | ESA

Image Source: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1827a/

Curator: ESA/Hubble, Garching bei München, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License