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[rock music]

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The Guardians of the Galaxy may
have some skills at protecting

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the universe from bad guys, but
the Hubble Space Telescope also

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has some amazing superpowers
when it comes to observing

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galaxies. A galaxy is an
enormous collection of billions

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or trillions of stars and other
matter that is gravitationally

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held together. Most of the
individual stars you see with

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the naked eye are in our own
galaxy, the Milky Way, but if

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you use a telescope like Hubble
that can see fainter objects,

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you can spot other galaxies in
all sorts of configurations. For

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Hubble’s 27th birthday this
April, we released this new

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image of two spiral galaxies
that are about 55 million

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light-years away. The galaxy on
the right is viewed almost

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face-on at a slight angle, and
the galaxy on the left is viewed

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edge on. They’re very pretty,
but it would be too easy to

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guard just two galaxies. Check
out this brand new Frontier

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Fields image showing thousands
of galaxies using two combined

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superpowers - Hubble’s
incredible optics above Earth’s

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atmosphere, and a quirk of
nature called gravitational

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lensing. The enormous mass of a
cluster of galaxies is warping

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space in a way that acts as a
lens that magnifies, brightens,

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and distorts the light from
galaxies behind it. The galaxies

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in cluster Abell 370 are the
bright yellowish white smudges,

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and they’re about 4 billion
light-years away. Most of the

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other smudges are background
galaxies being gravitationally

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lensed by the galaxy cluster,
and some of them you can see are

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incredibly distorted, like this
dragon-shaped feature, which

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seems like a monster straight
out of a comic book but is

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actually a single spiral galaxy
appearing in multiple locations

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next to each other in an arc.
One of the farthest galaxies in

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this image is this little red
dot, which is over 13 billion

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light-years away, and it appears
in multiple locations from the

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distortion of the gravitational
lens. We’re seeing this galaxy

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as it appeared only 600 million
years after the Big Bang. The

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Hubble Space Telescope is
helping keep watch over many,

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many galaxies, so if we spot any
trouble going down in a far

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corner of the universe, we'll be
sure to let Star-Lord and his

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team know.

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nasa.gov/hubble 
@NASAHubble