Hubble captures astonishing range of distances in Hydra constellation

Jan. 10 () –

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a small patch of sky in the constellation Hydra, with stars and galaxies spanning an astonishing range of distances.

The objects in this image that are closest to us are stars within our own Milky Way galaxy. NASA reports.

These stars can be easily detected by their diffraction peaks, lines that radiate from bright light sources, such as nearby stars, as a result of how that light interacts with the supports on Hubble’s secondary mirror. The bright star that sits just at the edge of the prominent bluish galaxy is just 3,230 light-years away, according to measurements by ESA’s Gaia space observatory.

Behind this star is a galaxy called LEDA 803211. At 622 million light-years away, this galaxy is close enough that its bright galactic core is clearly visible, as are numerous star clusters scattered around its irregular disk. . Many of the more distant galaxies in this image look like stars, with no discernible structure, but without the diffraction peaks of a star in our galaxy.

Of all the galaxies in this image, a couple stand out: a smooth, golden galaxy surrounded by a nearly complete ring in the upper right corner of the image. This curious configuration is the result of gravitational lensing that warps and magnifies light from distant objects. Einstein predicted the curvature of space-time by matter in his general theory of relativity, and Galaxies apparently stretched into rings like the one in this image are called Einstein rings.

The lensed galaxy, whose image looks like a ring, is incredibly far from Earth: we’re seeing it as it was when the universe was just 2.5 billion years old. The galaxy that acts as a gravitational lens itself is probably much closer. A near-perfect alignment of the two galaxies is necessary to give us this rare kind of view of galactic life in the early days of the universe.