[rock music]
The Guardians of the Galaxy may have some skills at protecting
the universe from bad guys, but the Hubble Space Telescope also
has some amazing superpowers when it comes to observing
galaxies. A galaxy is an enormous collection of billions
or trillions of stars and other matter that is gravitationally
held together. Most of the individual stars you see with
the naked eye are in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, but if
you use a telescope like Hubble that can see fainter objects,
you can spot other galaxies in all sorts of configurations. For
Hubble’s 27th birthday this April, we released this new
image of two spiral galaxies that are about 55 million
light-years away. The galaxy on the right is viewed almost
face-on at a slight angle, and the galaxy on the left is viewed
edge on. They’re very pretty, but it would be too easy to
guard just two galaxies. Check out this brand new Frontier
Fields image showing thousands of galaxies using two combined
superpowers - Hubble’s incredible optics above Earth’s
atmosphere, and a quirk of nature called gravitational
lensing. The enormous mass of a cluster of galaxies is warping
space in a way that acts as a lens that magnifies, brightens,
and distorts the light from galaxies behind it. The galaxies
in cluster Abell 370 are the bright yellowish white smudges,
and they’re about 4 billion light-years away. Most of the
other smudges are background galaxies being gravitationally
lensed by the galaxy cluster, and some of them you can see are
incredibly distorted, like this dragon-shaped feature, which
seems like a monster straight out of a comic book but is
actually a single spiral galaxy appearing in multiple locations
next to each other in an arc. One of the farthest galaxies in
this image is this little red dot, which is over 13 billion
light-years away, and it appears in multiple locations from the
distortion of the gravitational lens. We’re seeing this galaxy
as it appeared only 600 million years after the Big Bang. The
Hubble Space Telescope is helping keep watch over many,
many galaxies, so if we spot any trouble going down in a far
corner of the universe, we'll be sure to let Star-Lord and his
team know.
nasa.gov/hubble @NASAHubble