There are moments in my life when I am vividly reminded why I love astronomy and also love sharing it with others.

When I first saw this image, my eyes widened, I sharply inhaled, and muttered “Holy [expletive deleted]” under my breath.

Are you ready for this? No, you are not. But still: Behold.

HOLY WHAT IN HEAVEN?!

It looks like a spiral galaxy, right, but somehow distorted, like a half-stirred latte, if your coffee is made of orange fire and liquid pearl.

And, well, that’s basically correct. It’s a spiral galaxy, but also an elliptical one, and while they’re a cosmos apart, the light of one is being stirred by the gravity of the other.

This is an example of a gravitational lens, and one of the most gorgeous examples I’ve ever seen. Maybe the most. 

The image was taken as one part of a massive observation program on JWST called SLICE, for Strong LensIng and Cluster Evolution. A team of astronomers is aiming the huge observatory at 182 different clusters of galaxies (think of them as like cities of galaxies, some with hundreds and even thousands of individual galaxies in them), taking short exposures in two different filters to learn as much about these structures in as short amount of time as possible. They hope to get a better understanding of how galaxies interact with each other and the cluster as a whole.

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One of these clusters, called PSZ2 G304.84-41.40, is about 2 billion light-years from Earth, so it’s a substantial fraction of the observable Universe away from us. In it, among many other galaxies, is an elliptical galaxy, one shaped more or less like a cotton ball. However, from our point of view on Earth, almost exactly behind it but much farther away from us is a spiral galaxy, perhaps not unlike our own Milky Way. It has a central bulge of older stars surrounded by spiral arms punctuated with giant gas clouds where huge numbers of stars are being born.

The light from that spiral in the background has to pass right by the elliptical galaxy in the foreground on its way to us. The elliptical has billions of stars in it, and therefore has a decent amount of gravity. As Einstein predicted in his theory of General Relativity, gravity distorts space. As light travels through that warped space it follows the curves, like a truck driving along a highway follows the curve of the road. 

This is similar to how a lens behaves, refracting (bending) light. So we call this effect a gravitational lens, where in this case the elliptical galaxy is the lens creating the bending, and the spiral is the lensed galaxy. Its light gets distorted as it passes the elliptical.

The distortion can take many forms. It can amplify the brightness and increase the size of the image in the same way a glass lens does. It can create multiple images of the same object, making such strange and delightful effects like an Einstein Cross. In some cases it can warp the background source into a complete ring called, you guessed it, an Einstein Ring.

We see that here. In the center is the elliptical galaxy, the smaller yellowish object. Wrapped immediately around it is the warped image of the spiral galaxy. If you look to the bottom at the 6 o’clock position you can see the spiral’s core, but if you look to the upper right at the 2 o’clock position, you can see… the spiral galaxy’s core! As promised, some of the background galaxy’s light has been split by the lens, creating multiple images. You can see bright clumps in the spiral arms, which are those star factories I mentioned, too.

This spectacular image is the combination of images taken by both Hubble and JWST. What you see displayed as blue is actually red light from Hubble, and teal is near-infrared light in the Hubble image. Orange and red are infrared light (1.5 and 3.22 micron wavelengths) from JWST. 

The spiral galaxy is so far behind the elliptical that the expansion of the Universe itself has redshifted the light from it; hydrogen gas clouds that tend to be bright in red wavelengths by eye may have been shifted to infrared here. Ultraviolet light may be shifted to blue wavelengths, which is why so much of the galaxy looks blue (I’m guessing; no paper has been written yet about this object). I don’t know the actual distance of the spiral, though I think it might be possible to get a broad estimate from the colors of the image. I’ll leave that up to the astronomers who took the shot.

Gravitational lenses are important astronomical tools. They can amplify the light of a faint object so that it’s bright enough to see, and magnify it so we can see otherwise hidden details. This allows us to peer more deeply into the Universe than we could without the lens. The distribution of mass in the lensing galaxy can also be determined, which in turn can yield hints about the dark matter content.

Like every other time in astronomy, this is more than just a mind-vaporizingly gorgeous image. It’s science, and that too is beautiful.

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