An anomaly from Hubble’s archive — Gravitational lens 1

This is a previously-undiscovered astrophysical anomaly, found in the 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.

This image depicts a gravitational lens, where the enormous mass of one galaxy distorts, bends and magnifies light from another galaxy behind it, resulting in a warped image of the background galaxy. The gravitational lens is easily identifiable here, with the lensed galaxy forming an arc around the dense core of the foreground, lensing galaxy.

Read more about this new research here.

[Image description: A small image of a galaxy. It’s round with a bright white centre and a faint halo of light around that. A band of light runs down through the galaxy, notably bending around the galaxy’s core as if pushed away. This band is an image of a background galaxy, formed by gravitational lensing.]