Gravity’s Sculpture

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Grav­ity sculpts time and space into an arc in this NASA/ESA Hub­ble Space Tele­scope image of a deep view of the universe.

Explore this image of LRG-4–606. What sto­ries or pat­terns do you see? Leave a note below.

LRG stands for Lumi­nous Red Galaxy. Sci­en­tists gave it this name because of the large clus­ter of bright red galax­ies found in this image. Most of the galax­ies are giant ellip­ti­cal galax­ies with huge num­bers of old stars. As you explore the image look for the numer­ous far­away galax­ies. Each of these huge galax­ies are made up of bil­lions of stars; stars just like our Sun, smaller stars and giant stars. There are hun­dreds of bil­lions of stars in this image. The bright star on the right side of the image is found within our own Milky Way Galaxy. The rays shoot­ing from the star are cre­ated by the lenses and mir­rors of the Hub­ble Space Telescope.

The most dra­matic part of this image is to the left. Look for the arc of light. The red ellip­ti­cal galaxy is so mas­sive and with such strong grav­ity that it bends the light of galax­ies behind it. Astronomers call this grav­i­ta­tional lens­ing. The ellip­ti­cal galaxy curves and sculpts the fab­ric of space and time. Grav­ity is bend­ing and bright­en­ing the light from the blue back­ground galax­ies. The spe­cial align­ment of the far-off galaxy and the ellip­ti­cal galaxy make for a near-perfect half-circle of light. If you look closer, other smaller arcs can be seen. Each of these arcs is another galaxy on the far side of the red ellip­ti­cal galaxy.