Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Rigby (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), K. Sharon (Kavli Inst. for Cosmological Physics, Univ. of Chicago), and M. Gladders and E. Wuyts (Univ. of Chicago)
Thanks to the presence of a natural "zoom lens" in space, this is a
close-up look at the brightest distant "magnified" galaxy in the
universe known to date. It is one of the most striking examples of
gravitational lensing, where the gravitational field of a foreground
galaxy bends and amplifies the light of a more distant background
galaxy. In this image the light from a distant galaxy, nearly 10
billion light-years away, has been warped into a nearly 90-degree arc
of light in the galaxy cluster RCS2 032727-132623. The galaxy cluster
lies 5 billion light-years away. The background galaxy's image is over three times brighter than typically lensed galaxies. The natural color image was taken in March 2011 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide
Field Camera 3.