The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a patch of sky in the constellation Hydra, revealing stars and galaxies spanning a staggering range of distances.
The European Space Agency writes about this.
The closest stars to Earth in this image are in our Milky Way galaxy, marked by diffraction spikes—bright streaks that appear around stars in astronomical photographs. The bright star at the edge of the bluish galaxy is located 3 230 light-years away.
ESA / Hubble / NASA
Behind this star is a galaxy called LEDA 803211, 622 million light-years away, which has numerous star clusters scattered around its irregular disk.
Of all the galaxies in the frame, one pair stands out in particular: a smooth golden galaxy surrounded by a nearly complete ring in the upper right corner of the image. This is the result of gravitational lensing, where light from a distant object is distorted and magnified by the gravity of a massive foreground object, such as a galaxy or galaxy cluster. The lensed galaxy, which appears as a ring, is incredibly far from Earth. It appears as it was when the universe was just 2.5 billion years old.
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