“Space – The Final Frontier” reads one famous line in film posterity. However, today space no longer remains a deserted horizon with its innermost reaches being exposed by the most famous telescope of them all — The Hubble Space Telescope.
This telescope recently proved its brilliance in reaching out to the far reaches of the cosmos when it discovered a cluster of galaxies, which experts estimate are as far as 3.5 billion light years away.
The telescopic image displays the cluster ACO S 295 along with stars and galaxies floating around, according to NASA which described the image as one that is “…populated by galaxies of all shapes and sizes ranging from stately spirals to fuzzy elliptical.”
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Termed as a ‘galactic menagerie’, this discovery highlights a range of galaxies with different orientations and sizes, besides spiral galaxies such as the one at the centre of the image, and some edge-on spiral galaxies visible only as thin slivers of light.
The cluster’s huge mass has gravitationally lensed the light from background galaxies, distorting and smearing their shapes, Nasa stated, while adding that a gravitational lens occurs when a huge amount of matter, like a cluster of galaxies, creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from distant galaxies that are behind it but in the same line of sight.
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NASA emphasized that gravitational lensing — apart from providing astronomers with a natural magnifying glass to study distant galaxies — has framed the centre of this image in producing a visually striking scene.
The Hubble Space Telescope recently made headlines in tracing locations of five brief, powerful radio blasts to the spiral arms of five distant galaxies. Though scientists have managed to find the location of just 15 such bursts – where finding the source of origin of such events holds massive importance in determining what kinds of astronomical events trigger these intense flashes of energy — Analysis of images captured by Hubble played a critical role in finding the location of five such blasts in a spiral galaxy, NASA said. (AW)
