An international team of astronomers captured the best view of two colliding galaxies, which occurred at the time when the known Universe was still half of its present age.
The image was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, a group of telescopes installed on the ground and in space, and a galaxy-sized magnifying glass.
The two colliding images in the picture resembled the Antennae Galaxies, a pair of interacting galaxies in the constellation Corvus. The team believed that the newly discovered colliding galaxies, dubbed as H1429-0028, used to have a disc-like structure. But, compared to the Antennae Galaxies which have ten times the mass of our own Sun per year, the H1429-0028 has 400 times the mass of the Sun.
The astronomers described how they were able to capture the best view of the collision of the two galaxies.
"While astronomers are often limited by the power of their telescopes, in some cases our ability to see detail is hugely boosted by natural lenses, created by the Universe," explains lead author Hugo Messias of the Universidad de Concepción (Chile) and the Centro de Astronomia e Astrofísica da Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal).
"Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity that, given enough mass, light does not travel in a straight line but will be bent in a similar way to light refracted by a normal lens," he added.
Scientists dubbed the imaging technique they used as "gravitational lensing." In this technique, the magnifying lenses were created through the light produced by galaxy clusters. The light emitted from these clusters may be bent by different gravitational forces surrounding them. It allowed the researchers to control the magnifying properties to obtain more details about the colliding galaxies.
"We need to observe with Hubble to find cases of gravitational lensing and to highlight in high resolution the clues left by these huge cosmic lenses," said Rob Ivison, co-author and ESO's Director for Science.
Further details of the research were published in the Aug. 26 issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
