A Lot of Galaxies Need Guarding in This NASA Hubble View

Power of Massive Galaxy Cluster Harnessed to Probe Remote Galaxies in
Early Universe

Like the quirky characters in the upcoming film Guardians of the Galaxy
Vol. 2, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has some amazing superpowers,
specifically when it comes to observing galaxies across time and space.
One stunning example is galaxy cluster Abell 370, which contains a vast
assortment of several hundred galaxies tied together by the mutual pull
of gravity. That's a lot of galaxies to be guarding, and just in this
one cluster! Photographed in a combination of visible and near-infrared
light, the immense cluster is a rich mix of galaxy shapes. Entangled
among the galaxies are mysterious-looking arcs of blue light. These are
actually distorted images of remote galaxies behind the cluster. These
far-flung galaxies are too faint for Hubble to see directly. Instead,
the gravity of the cluster acts as a huge lens in space, magnifying and
stretching images of background galaxies like a funhouse mirror. Abell
370 is located approximately 4 billion light-years away in the
constellation Cetus, the Sea Monster. It is the last of six galaxy
clusters imaged in the recently concluded Frontier Fields project - an
ambitious, community-developed collaboration among NASA's Great
Observatories and other telescopes that harnessed the power of massive
galaxy clusters and probed the earliest stages of galaxy development.

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2017-20

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Eduardo
Sorocaba-Brasil
www.alt119.net - Art-Culture-Lusophony