An anomaly from Hubble’s archive – Gravitational lens 2

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.

Two dramatically different galaxies are revealed in this Hubble image. A compact, reddish elliptical galaxy is accompanied by a blue spiral galaxy squashed into an arc shape. This is the result of gravitational lensing, where light from the spiral galaxy – actually residing in the background – has been bent by the mass of the heavy elliptical galaxy, creating this distorted image of the spiral.

[Image description: A small image of a galaxy. It is compact and oval-shaped, dark orange in colour with a white spot at the very centre. Along the right edge of this galaxy sits a bright blue arc, the same length as the elliptical galaxy. This is an image of a background galaxy, formed by gravitational lensing.]

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