The Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a giant magnifying glass in space, a cluster of galaxies called Abell 2218, two million light years from Earth.

The many fuzzy blobs in the image are members of this cluster, which is so massive that its enormous gravitational field deflects light rays passing through it, just as an optical lens bends light passing through it.

This phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, magnifies, brightens and distorts images from farther off objects, providing a tool for viewing galaxies that could not be observed with the largest telescopes. The lens effect has produced the many arc-shaped patterns in the image. These arcs are the distorted images of very distant galaxies which lie 5 to 10 times farther than the lensing cluster. Astronomers can now study these arcs to learn more about galaxies which were formed when the universe was only a quarter of its present age.

Photo Credit: STScI/NASA