Since ancient times, humans have looked to the stars for answers to life’s biggest questions. Now, new images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal a bizarre cosmic object that appears to be throwing a question of its own right back at us.
Spotted by JWST’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph instrument, the object in question is a pair of distant galaxies being warped, magnified and multiplied into the shape of a cosmic question mark. Inquisitive aliens are (likely) not responsible — rather, it’s caused by a rare form of a common cosmological phenomenon called gravitational lensing, NASA researchers revealed in a statement.
“We know of only three or four occurrences of similar gravitational lens configurations in the observable universe,” Guillaume Desprez, an astronomer at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia and a member of the team behind the new image, said in the statement. The scarcity of other objects like this one “makes this find exciting,” Desprez added, and it speaks to JWST’s power to see what prior space telescopes could not.
Gravitational lensing occurs when the gravity of a massive foreground object — such as an enormous galaxy or a cluster of galaxies — bends the light of objects located behind it, relative to our view from Earth. The effect creates a sort of cosmic spyglass, which can not only magnify our view of background…
Source www.livescience.com
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