The Hubble Space Telescope's images are often mind-blowing. Sometimes Hubble captures light-bending images.
Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 snapped a photo of a galaxy where the light has been bent by gravity, so that it would show up three times. The multiple views are not replicas of each other.
There are clumps of light in the bottom right corner of the image. The galaxy has a license-plate-like name and appears once as a curved arcs and twice as small dots around the bright star.
Why does it look that way? A giant object is aligned between Earth and another giant object. Einstein predicted that gravity could bend light, and this image is a great example of how gravity can cause light to be shifted.
In this case, the gravity of a massive object in the foreground is what causes the curved shape of SGAS 0033+03. The Hubble team says that the sky is very bright and close to a very bright star. The star can be used to calibrate and correct observations.
The name of the survey is so named because it searches for and identifies highly magnified galaxies that were lensed by foreground galaxy clusters.
There are other lensed galaxies in this image. The picture seems to hold more galaxies than stars.
The engineers and scientists of Hubble are still working to get the telescope back to normal operations after a glitch put it in safe mode. The science instruments were not available for observations. The instruments couldn't collect data because of a Synchronization error. Engineers were able to bring the Advanced Camera for Surveys back online in early November, and then recovered the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument as of November 21.
You can read more about Hubble here. The larger version of the lead image can be found here.
