A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies, seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies.

Biggest 'Zoom Lens' in Space Extends Hubble's Reach

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, has used a natural "zoom lens" in space to boost its view of the distant universe. Besides offering an unprecedented and dramatic new view of the cosmos, the results promise to shed light on galaxy evolution and dark matter in space.

Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive known galaxy clusters, called Abell 1689. This required Hubble to gaze at the distant cluster, located more than 2.2 billion light-years away, for more than 13 hours. The gravity of the cluster's trillion stars, plus dark matter, acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide "lens" in space. This "gravitational lens" bends and magnifies the light of the galaxies located far behind it.

The Advanced Camera's IMAX movie-quality sharpness, combined with the behemoth lens, reveals remote galaxies previously beyond even Hubble's reach. A few may be twice as faint as those photographed in the Hubble Deep Field, which previously pushed the telescope to its sensitivity limits. Though much more analysis is needed, Hubble astronomers speculate that some of the faintest objects in the picture are probably over 13 billion light-years away.

For more on the new image captured by Hubble, go to: http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/news-release/releases/2003/h03-003.htm