A NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy cluster CL1358+62 has uncovered a gravitationally lensed image of a more distant galaxy located far beyond the cluster. The gravitationally lensed image appears as a red crescent to the lower right of center. The galaxy's image is brightened, magnified, and smeared into an arc-shape by the gravitational influence of the intervening galaxy cluster, which acts like a gigantic lens.

Exact measurement of the distance from spectroscopic observations with the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii show the lensed galaxy is the farthest ever seen. Its light is only reaching us now from a time when the universe was but 7 percent its current age of approximately 14 billion years. This places the young galaxy as far as 13 billion light-years away. The lensing foreground cluster is 5 billion light-years from us.

The image was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on January 13, 1996.

Image credit: Marijn Franx (University of Groningen, The Netherlands), Garth Illingworth (UC Santa Cruz), and NASA

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