NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures Universe's brightest galaxies

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lowenthal (Smith College)

New York: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a beautiful and close view of the brightest infrared galaxies in the Universe by using a cosmic magnifying-glass effect.

The galaxies are as much as 10,000 times more luminous than the Milky Way.

The cosmic magnifying effect, which is a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, occurs when the intense gravity of a massive galaxy or cluster of galaxies magnifies the light of fainter, more distant background sources.

The galaxy images revealed a tangled web of misshapen objects punctuated by exotic patterns such as rings and arcs.

The odd shapes are due largely to the foreground lensing galaxies' powerful gravity distorting the images of the background galaxies.

Researchers observed that the unusual forms also may have been produced by spectacular collisions between distant, massive galaxies in a sort of cosmic demolition derby.

Lead researcher James Lowenthal of Smith College in Massachusetts, US said,"We have hit the jackpot of gravitational lenses."

He added,"These ultra-luminous galaxies are very rare. Gravitational lensing magnifies them so that you can see small details that otherwise are unimaginable. We want to understand what's powering these monsters, and gravitational lensing allows us to study them."

The results were presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

The galaxies are ablaze with runaway star formation, pumping out more than 10,000 new stars a year. This unusually rapid star birth occurred at the peak of the universe's star-making boom more than 8 billion years ago, the light from which we are observing now.

The star-birth frenzy creates lots of dust, which enshrouds the galaxies, making them too faint to detect in visible light. But they glow fiercely in infrared light, shining with the brilliance of 10 trillion to 100 trillion suns, the researchers noted.

According to researchers, there are only a few dozen of these bright infrared galaxies exist in the universe, scattered across the sky, which may hold clues to how galaxies formed billions of years ago.

(With IANS inputs)