Abell 2744 captured: 'Pandora's Cluster' as seen by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope! (See pic)

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

New Delhi: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a beautiful image of galaxy cluster Abell 2744, also called Pandora's Cluster, allowing astonomers to study the distant universe.

As per NASA, the gravity of this galaxy cluster is strong enough that it acts as a lens to magnify images of more distant background galaxies.

This technique, called gravitational lensing, is caused by an object's influence on the space-time around it.

The fuzzy blobs in the image are the massive galaxies at the core of this cluster. NASA says atronomers will focus on the faint streaks of light created where the cluster magnifies a distant background galaxy.

The cluster is also being studied by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory in a collaboration called the Frontier Fields project. Hubble's image of Abell 2744 can be seen in the image.

The Spitzer Space Telescope, launched on August 25, 2003 from Florida, is an infrared space observatory. It is the fourth and final of the NASA Great Observatories program.

Drifting in a unique Earth-trailing orbit around the Sun, Spitzer is designed to detect infrared radiation, which is primarily heat radiation.