PHOTO: STScI-PRC14-01a
Frontier Fields Image of Galaxy Cluster Abell 2744
This long-exposure Hubble Space Telescope image of massive galaxy cluster
Abell 2744 is the deepest ever made of any cluster of galaxies. It shows some of
the faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected in space. Abell 2744, located in
the constellation Sculptor, appears in the foreground of this image. It contains
several hundred galaxies as they looked 3.5 billion years ago. The immense
gravity in Abell 2744 acts as a gravitational lens to warp space and brighten and
magnify images of nearly 3,000 distant background galaxies. The more-distant
galaxies appear as they did longer than 12 billion years ago, not long after the
big bang. This image is part of an unprecedented long-distance view of the
universe from an ambitious collaborative project among the NASA Great
Observatories called The Frontier Fields. Over the next several years select
patches of the sky will be photographed for the purpose of better understanding
galaxy evolution. This visible-light and near-infrared composite image was taken
with the Wide Field Camera 3.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer, and the HFF Team (STScI)
