Woah… NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI)

It’s galaxies galore in this latest “deep field” picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, a series of observations that concentrate in on a tiny patch of sky to reveal the majesty of the distant universe.

Hubble took this image by gazing deep out into the cosmos at the galaxy cluster Abell S1063, the bright smudge you can see at the centre, which is 100 million million times the mass of the sun and contains hundreds of galaxies.

The cluster is 4 billion light-years away from Earth, but its massive gravity allows Hubble to see even further into the universe, by warping and magnifying the light of galaxies behind it.


You can see the effect of this warping in the strange lines that seem to arc around the cluster. These are ordinary galaxies whose image have been distorted by the gravitational lensing, forming a partial Einstein ring, an effect named after the famous physicist who predicted it.

Staring deeper into space also allows astronomers to peer back into the past, as it takes time for light from distant objects to reach us. The most distant galaxy in this image appears as it did just 1 billion years after the big bang.