Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · Jun 13 This is one of those JWST photos that's kinda hard to wrap your head around. The central bright thing is a galaxy cluster so unbelievably massive it's warping spacetime itself. And the weird streaks around it is light from much more distant galaxies being distorted, a bit like a fisheye lens.
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The central bright feature is Abell S1063, among the most massive known galaxy clusters. Its distortion of spacetime means it acts as a "gravitational lens". One of the most interesting features in this whole scene is a tiny (relatively speaking) "little red dot" at lower right. A black hole star.
Just astonishing and beautiful
Gravitational lensing is so cool! Like the universe was worried we wouldn't be able to see some really nifty far away things so it have us glasses
I don’t know if it happens here, but in some cases the light from one of the background objects is distorted in a way that it appears twice.
I wish I could have seen the looks on their faces when scientists first saw this.
my head will never grow big enough to get around this
Gravity: weird.
that warm-red arc is the long-wave nircam side (around f444w, 4.4 µm) picking up dust and the older stars in the lensed background galaxy. the pipeline-reduced i2d products are on mast if you ever want to pull the fits and make your own render.