The last meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) gave the opportunity to present the latest discoveries made by the Hubble Space Telescope. Among thise there’s a photograph with unprecedented detail of Abell 2744, also called Pandora Cluster, a giant galaxy cluster.

Astronomers had already observed Abell 2744 with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011, investigating the history of this cluster. Their conclusions were that at least four galactic clusters had crashed into one another to form a super-cluster never seen before.

Abell 2744 has enough gravity to cause an effect of gravitational lensing, magnifying images of more distant galaxies. This possibility is exploited by the “Frontier Fields” program, which in the course of three years aims to use the Hubble Space Telescope to observe six different galaxy clusters. These observations will reach levels of detail never seen for galaxies that appear between 10 and 100 times fainter than those ever observed before taking advantage of the effects of magnification of these gravitational lenses.

Colorful spirals and ellipticals galaxies are piled up at the center of the image. The effects of the gravity of this cluster are visible in the blue arches and the distorted shapes scattered here and there, including galaxies that seem to bleed into the surrounding space. Those arcs are actually the distorted images of distant galaxies.

The Abell 2744 cluster was the first of the six clusters of galaxies observed and tested in practice the validity of this approach. The effect of gravitational lens allowed to observe almost 3,000 galaxies in the background. The most distant galaxies appear as they were 12 billion years ago, when the universe was still young. Five of the observed galaxies seem to have been observed several times because of this gravitational lens.

The images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope will be combined with those taken by Spitzer and Chandra Space Telescopes to obtain more information on the origin and evolution of galaxies with their holes blacks. For astronomers, the results are already very interesting because they offer great prospects for future studies of the primordial universe.

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