NASA, along with the European Space Agency (ESA), has released a picture taken by the Hubble Telescope to celebrate Star Trek’s anniversary, showing distant galaxies from billion years ago using a psychic phenomenon called gravitational lensing.
The space agencies are calling the picture “Space: the final frontier” in honor of the science-fiction movie franchise Star Trek and its most recent film, and honoring the new explorations being held by both, NASA and ESA. By using the Hubble Telescope, the agencies managed to see an ancient galaxy cluster, called Abell S1063, which serves as home for thousands and even billions of different galaxies, planets and worlds.
The image captured by the Hubble shows the galaxy cluster as it looked four billion years ago and allows scientists to explore thousands of new galaxies, thanks to the size of its mass and its location.
In 1936, the world’s famous genius Albert Einstein developed the general theory of relativity in which he mentioned the gravitational lensing effect. This effect allows the observation of really distant objects, that wouldn’t be possible to see in other circumstances.
The gravitational lensing effect allows light that passes through it to bend in a certain way, since it doesn’t have a specific focal point, but a focal line. If the source of the light and the object creating the effect, are located in a direct line a ring will form, allowing the object to view all that surrounds the line.
Hubble Telescope was able to create this ring with the Abell S1063 cluster galaxy allowing scientists to observe millions of galaxies and worlds between Abell and the Hubble.
Discovering new worlds
Thanks to the picture taken by the Hubble, scientists have already discovered impressing things about the galaxies surrounding the image. For example, a galaxy was discovered just as it was just a few billion years after the Bing Bang.
The studies of dark matter, have also been improved by the image since astronomers have discovered around sixteen background galaxies around the cluster. Having the opportunity to look at the distribution of dark and ordinary matter in the cluster.
This is not the first time NASA and ESA try to study galaxy clusters with big masses in the universe, in the past three other clusters, have been explored and there are still more to come thanks to NASA’s Frontier Fields program.
For now, Star Trek’s fans can be thrilled for the fact the Hubble Telescope managed to capture such an effect that brings to life the franchises details.
Source: Space Telescope