How gravitational lensing acts as a magnifying glass — diagram

This diagram shows how the effect of gravitational lensing around a normal galaxy focuses the light coming from a very distant star-forming galaxy merger to created a distorted, but brighter view.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes on the ground and in space have enlisted the help of a galaxy-sized magnifying glass to reveal otherwise invisible detail and obtain the best view yet of a collision that took place between two galaxies when the Universe was only half its current age. The image showing these combined observations can be seen in the inset.

These new studies of the galaxy H-ATLAS J142935.3-002836 have shown that this complex and distant object looks surprisingly like the well-known local galaxy collision, the Antennae Galaxies.