Hubble image captures hundreds of galaxies 6 billion light-years away

In a breathtaking image of hundreds of galaxies, the Hubble Space Telescope provides an incredible display of a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

The telescope, run jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency, imaged a region six billion light-years away containing the galaxy clusterAbell370.

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Gravitational lensing, first proposed by physicist Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity, warps space-time, bending light. In the case of this image, galaxies beyond the cluster spread out along multiple paths and appear in a few locations.

The region was already imaged in 2009, but this new image contains far more galaxies at a better resolution.

As for the image itself, it took a lot of time to obtain: 630 hours and more than560 orbits of Earth.

• Click on azoomable image