NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency), the operators of the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb), have released a new image taken by the telescope that depicts a cluster of galaxies warping the light emitted from more distant cosmic bodies.
Known as “gravitational lensing”, the phenomenon – which was first theorized by Albert Einstein – occurs when gravitational forces produced by massive objects, such as galaxies, bend spacetime, which in turn warps and magnifies light traveling in their path.
The newly released image was made the Webb Picture of the Month for September by NASA/ESA. In the foreground we see a handful of extremely bright stars, along with a cluster of galaxies – which appears to contain a compact subgroup of distorted orange galaxies.
According to NASA/ESA, the galaxy cluster in the foreground is MACS J0454.1-0300 – which, to Webb’s instruments, appears as it was when the universe was roughly 8 billion years old.
The warped orange cluster of galaxies is, meanwhile, seen as it was when the universe was about 2 billion years old, a point in spacetime much further away from Earth than the location of MACS J0454.1-0300.
However, as the light from the more distant orange galaxy cluster is gravitationally lensed by MACS J0454.1-0300, it appears as though we are seeing a single, closer and highly packed galaxy cluster.
The astronomers explained how, in this image, some of the distant galaxies that have been gravitationally lensed appear multiple times.
According to the scientists, gravitational lensing can also cause the same image to be projected more than once, creating an optical illusion that the astronomers called a “cosmic house of mirrors.”
I don’t know about you, but now knowing what NASA/ESA astronomers deal with when capturing images with Webb, I don’t think any of us regular photographers can complain about working with tricky subjects ever again!
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