The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a vivid image of a galaxy cluster called Abell 2537.
This Hubble image shows the galaxy cluster Abell 2537. The image is a composite of separate exposures acquired by Hubble’s ACS and WFC3 instruments. Five filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.
Abell 2537 is located approximately 3 billion light-years away in the constellation Pisces.
Galaxy clusters such as this one contain thousands of galaxies of all ages, shapes and sizes, together totaling a mass thousands of times greater than that of our Milky Way Galaxy.
These groupings of galaxies are very useful in probing mysterious cosmic phenomena like dark matter and dark energy, the latter of which is thought to define the geometry of the entire Universe.
There is so much matter stuffed into a cluster like Abell 2537 that its gravity has visible effects on its surroundings.
Abell 2537’s gravity warps the very structure of its environment (spacetime), causing light to travel along distorted paths through space.
This phenomenon can produce a magnifying effect, allowing us to see objects that lie behind the cluster and are thus otherwise unobservable from Earth.
Abell 2537 is a particularly efficient lens, as demonstrated by the stretched stripes and streaking arcs visible in the frame. These smeared shapes are in fact galaxies, their light heavily distorted by the gravitational field of the cluster.
This image of Abell 2537 was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instruments as part of an observing program called Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey (RELICS).
RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters over the course of 390 Hubble orbits and 100 Spitzer Space Telescope observing hours, aiming to find the brightest distant galaxies.
Studying these galaxies in more detail with both current telescopes and the future James Webb Space Telescope will hopefully tell us more about our cosmic origins.
