Story thread · 2 reports / 2 sources

Galaxies in a cosmic house of mirrors

esa.int · 2hShare

Image: This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features galaxies in great detail that have been warped and multiplied like they’ve stepped into a house of mirrors. The brilliant golden galaxies splashed across this image belong to a galaxy cluster called MACS J0454.1-0300. The orange galaxies concentrated on one side of the cluster are not actually part of the cluster and are much farther away from us. MACS J0454.1-0300 is itself immensely distant: the light from these galaxies has been travelling to us for so long that we’re seeing the cluster as it was when the Universe was about 8 billion years old. While this galaxy cluster is a valuable scientific target in its own right, the real stars of this image are the galaxies that appear warped and stretched, like a painting that has been smeared by a giant hand. The way these galaxies look is the result of gravitational lensing , in which the enormous mass of a foreground object such as a galaxy cluster bends and

First report: Black hole jets reach far beyond galaxies' visible edges, potentially deciding their fate — phys.org, 2d