A zoom into the Hubble Space Telescope photograph of an enormous, balloon-like bubble being blown into space by a super-hot, massive star. Astronomers trained the iconic telescope on this colorful feature, called the Bubble Nebula, or NGC 7635.
According to Lisa Grossman
The Hubble Space Telescope just revealed the deepest view of the universe ever seen – and it relied on a traffic jam of galaxies to do it.
The new image (right) is the first in a series of “Frontier Field” images, which take advantage of an effect called gravitational lensing to peer further into the universe than ever before. Gravitational lensing happens when huge collections of matter – such as those found in galaxy clusters – warp the space-time around them so that the light from objects behind the clusters takes a curved path. These galaxy clusters can act as cosmic magnifying glasses, bringing objects into focus that would otherwise be too faint and distant to see.