An anomaly from Hubble’s archive – Gravitational lens 1

This is a previously-undiscovered astrophysical anomaly, found in the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s archive by researchers using a new AI-assisted method. The AI tool allowed them to sift through nearly 100 million image cutouts in just days, turning up rare and anomalous objects like this one.

This image depicts a gravitational lens, where the enormous mass of one galaxy distorts, bends and magnifies light from another galaxy behind it, resulting in a warped image of the background galaxy. The gravitational lens is easily identifiable here, with the lensed galaxy forming an arc around the dense core of the foreground, lensing galaxy.

[Image description: A small image of a galaxy. It’s round with a bright white centre and a faint halo of light around that. A band of light runs down through the galaxy, notably bending around the galaxy’s core as if pushed away. This band is an image of a background galaxy, formed by gravitational lensing.]

Read more