Aug 01, 2014 10:58 AM EDT
NASA's Hubble Telescope has spotted a massive galaxy acting like a magnifying glass, offering a look deeper into space.
According to the Washington Post, "lensing galaxies" are not always so big, but their gravitational forces can bend and distort light to make the space beyond appear larger and clearer. The new lensing galaxy is 9.6 billion light years from Earth and it is magnifying a small spiral galaxy 10.7 billion light years away.
The new magnifying galaxy is detailed in a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"When you look more than 9 billion years ago in the early universe, you don't expect to find this type of galaxy lensing at all," study lead researcher Kim-Vy Tran, of Texas A&M University, said in a press release. "It's very difficult to see an alignment between two galaxies in the early universe. Imagine holding a magnifying glass close to you and then moving it much farther away. When you look through a magnifying glass held at arm's length, the chances that you will see an enlarged object are high.
"But if you move the magnifying glass across the room, your chances of seeing the magnifying glass nearly perfectly aligned with another object beyond it diminishes."
The team of scientists suggests the newly found lensing galaxy has been building up dark matter for about nine billion years. Dark matter is not visible, but it makes up a majority of the universe.
"There are hundreds of lens galaxies that we know about, but almost all of them are relatively nearby, in cosmic terms," study first author Kenneth Wong, of Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics, said in the release. "To find a lens as far away as this one is a very special discovery because we can learn about the dark-matter content of galaxies in the distant past. By comparing our analysis of this lens galaxy to the more nearby lenses, we can start to understand how that dark-matter content has evolved over time."
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