Four of these images appear outside the triangle formed by the three intermediate galaxies and two appear inside that triangle. The gravitational effect of the intervening galaxies has caused the light and radio waves from the single, more-distant galaxy to be “bent” to form six images as seen from Earth. The more-distant galaxy shows signs that it contains a massive black hole at its core and also has regions in which new stars are forming. The gravitational lens, called CLASS B1359+154, consists of a galaxy more than 11 billion light-years away in the constellation Bootes, with a trio of galaxies more than 7 billion light-years away along the same line of sight. Because this is an intermediate case between gravitational lenses produced by single galaxies and lenses produced by large clusters of galaxies, it will give us insights we can’t get from other types of lenses,” Rusin added. “Such systems are expected to be extremely rare, so this discovery is an important stepping stone. “This is the first gravitational lens with more than four images of the background object that is produced by a small group of galaxies rather than a large cluster of galaxies,” said David Rusin, who just received his Ph.D. The unique configuration is produced by the gravitational effect of three galaxies along the line of sight between the more-distant galaxy and Earth. An international team of astronomers has used the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to discover the first gravitational lens in which the single image of a very distant galaxy has been split into six different images.
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