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Hubble captures a 'quintuple' quasar

23 May 2006

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This animation shows galaxy cluster SDSS J1004+4112 with three rare phenomena marked. The blue circles show a unique five time gravitationally lensed quasar. This image is the first-ever picture of such an object. A gravitational lens will always produce an odd number of lensed images, but one image is usually very weak and embedded deep within the light of the lensing object itself. Hubble’s sharp vision and the high magnification of this gravitational lens combine to place the fifth image far enough from the core of the central imaging galaxy to make it visible.

The red circles indicate three remarkably different images of the same background galaxy. The galaxy is 12 thousand million light years away (a redshift of 3.33, corresponding to only 1.8 thousand million years after the Big Bang).

The yellow circle marks a supernova that was found by comparing this image to a picture of the cluster obtained with Hubble a year earlier. This supernova exploded seven thousand million years ago in one of the cluster galaxies. This image, together with other supernova observations, is being used to understand how the Universe was enriched by heavy elements through these explosions.

Credits: NASA, ESA, Keren Sharon (Tel-Aviv University) and Eran Ofek (CalTech)

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Sky region hosting galaxy cluster SDSS J1004+4112

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This Hubble two-colour image shows an overview of region of sky where galaxy cluster SDSS J1004+4112 is located. It is composed from two images from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The field of view is slightly less than 3.0°.

Credits: ESA/Hubble and Digitized Sky Survey 2

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Hubble captures a ‘five-star’ rated gravitational lens

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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is the first-ever picture of a distant quasar lensed into five images. The five quasar images are produced in a process called 'gravitational lensing', in which the gravitational field of a massive object - in this case, a cluster of galaxies - bends and amplifies light from an object - in this case, a quasar – farther behind it.

Although other multiply lensed quasars have been seen before ( for instance in the object known as the 'Einstein Cross'), this newly observed 'quintuple quasar' is the only case so far in which multiple quasar images are produced by an entire galaxy cluster acting as a gravitational lens.

Credits: ESA/NASA/Keren Sharon (Tel-Aviv University) and Eran Ofek (CalTech)

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