{"id":616498,"date":"2026-09-30T15:58:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T15:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/616498\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T15:58:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T15:58:12","slug":"think-lens-flare-is-bad-james-webb-telescope-image-captures-warping-light-that-duplicates-galaxies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/616498\/","title":{"rendered":"Think lens flare is bad? James Webb Telescope image captures warping light that duplicates galaxies"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency), the operators of the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb), have released a new image taken by the telescope that depicts a cluster of galaxies warping the light emitted from more distant cosmic bodies.<\/p>\n

Known as \u201cgravitational lensing\u201d, the phenomenon \u2013 which was first theorized by Albert Einstein \u2013 occurs when gravitational forces produced by massive objects, such as galaxies, bend spacetime, which in turn warps and magnifies light traveling in their path.<\/p>\n

The newly released image was made the Webb Picture of the Month<\/a> for September by NASA\/ESA. In the foreground we see a handful of extremely bright stars, along with a cluster of galaxies \u2013 which appears to contain a compact subgroup of distorted orange galaxies.<\/p>\n

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\"Galaxy
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(Image credit: L. Furtak \/ S. Fujimoto \/ NASA \/ ESA \/ CSA)<\/p>\n

According to<\/a> NASA\/ESA, the galaxy cluster in the foreground is MACS J0454.1-0300 \u2013 which, to Webb\u2019s instruments, appears as it was when the universe was roughly 8 billion years old.<\/p>\n

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The warped orange cluster of galaxies is, meanwhile, seen as it was when the universe was about 2 billion years old, a point in spacetime much further away from Earth than the location of MACS J0454.1-0300.<\/p>\n

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However, as the light from the more distant orange galaxy cluster is gravitationally lensed by MACS J0454.1-0300, it appears as though we are seeing a single, closer and highly packed galaxy cluster.<\/p>\n

The astronomers explained how, in this image, some of the distant galaxies that have been gravitationally lensed appear multiple times.<\/p>\n

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According to the scientists, gravitational lensing can also cause the same image to be projected more than once, creating an optical illusion that the astronomers called a \u201ccosmic house of mirrors.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know about you, but now knowing what NASA\/ESA astronomers deal with when capturing images with Webb, I don\u2019t think any of us regular photographers can complain about working with tricky subjects ever again!<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s our expert\u2019s pick of the best telescopes for astrophotography and stargazing<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency), the operators of the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb), have released…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-616498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}