Magnifying deep space through the ‘carousel lens’ | Science & Technology

“This is an amazingly lucky ‘galactic line-up’ — a chance alignment of multiple galaxies across a line-of-sight spanning most of the observable universe,” said David Schlegel, a co-author of the study and a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division. “Finding one such alignment is a needle in the haystack. Finding all of these is like eight needles precisely lined up inside that haystack.”

The Carousel Lens is an alignment consisting of one foreground galaxy cluster (the ‘lens’) and seven background galaxies spanning immense cosmic distances and seen through the gravitationally distorted space-time around the lens. In the dramatic image below:

• The lensing cluster, located 5 billion light years away from Earth, is shown by its four brightest and most massive galaxies (indicated by La, Lb, Lc, and Ld), and these constitute the foreground of the image.
• Seven unique galaxies (numbered 1 through 7), appear through the lens. These are located far beyond, at distances from 7.6 to 12 billion light years away from Earth, approaching the limit of the observable universe.
• Each galaxy’s repeated appearances (indicated by each number’s letter index, e.g., a through d) show differences in shape that are curved and stretched into multiple “fun house mirror” iterations caused by the warped space-time around the lens.
• Of particular interest is the discovery of an Einstein Cross — the largest known to date — shown in galaxy number 4’s multiple appearances (indicated by 4a, 4b, 4c, and 4d). This rare configuration of multiple images around the center of the lens is an indication of the symmetrical…