A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies, seemingly caught in a red and blue spider web of eerily distorted background galaxies, makes for a spellbinding picture from the new Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard Hubble. To make this unprecedented image of the cosmos, Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, called Abell 1689. Credit: NASA, N. Benitez (JHU), T. Broadhurst (Racah Institute of Physics/The Hebrew University), H. Ford (JHU), M. Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory), the ACS Science Team and ESA

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, has used a natural "zoom lens" in space to boost its view of the distant universe. Besides offering an unprecedented and dramatic new view of the cosmos, the results promise to shed light on galaxy evolution and dark matter in space.

Hubble peered straight through the center of one of the most massive known galaxy clusters, called Abell 1689. This required Hubble to gaze at the distant cluster, located more than 2.2 billion light-years away, for more than 13 hours. The gravity of the cluster's trillion stars, plus dark matter, acts as a 2-million-light-year-wide "lens" in space. This "gravitational lens" bends and magnifies the light of the galaxies located far behind it.

The Advanced Camera's IMAX movie-quality sharpness, combined with the behemoth lens, reveals remote galaxies previously beyond even Hubble's reach. A few may be twice as faint as those photographed in the Hubble Deep Field, which previously pushed the telescope to its sensitivity limits. Though much more analysis is needed, Hubble astronomers speculate that some of the faintest objects in the picture are probably over 13 billion light-years away.

In the image, hundreds of galaxies, many billions of light- years away, are smeared by the gravitational bending of light into a spider-web tracing of blue and red arcs of light. Though gravitational lensing has been studied previously, with Hubble and ground-based telescopes, this phenomenon has never been seen in such detail.

The Advanced Camera picture reveals 10 times more arcs than would be seen by a ground-based telescope. The ACS is five times more sensitive, and provides pictures that are twice as sharp, as the previous workhorse Hubble cameras. It can see the very faintest arcs with greater clarity. The picture presents an immense jigsaw puzzle for Hubble astronomers to spend months untangling. Interspersed with the foreground cluster are thousands of galaxies, which are lensed images of the galaxies in the background universe.

Detailed analysis of the images promises to shed light on the mystery of dark matter. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter. It is the source of most of the gravity in the universe, because it is much more abundant than the "normal matter" that makes up planets, stars and galaxies. The lensing allows astronomers to map the distribution of dark matter in galaxy clusters. This should offer new clues to the nature of dark matter. By studying the lensed distant galaxies, astronomers expect to better trace the history of star formation in the universe over the past 13 billion years.

The picture is an exquisite demonstration of Albert Einstein's prediction that gravity warps space and therefore distorts a beam of light, like a rippled shower curtain. When the laws of relativity were formulated in the early 20th century, scientists did not know that stars were organized into galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. Great clusters of galaxies are massive enough to warp space and deflect light in a way that is detectable from Earth. The Abell cluster is the ideal target because it is so massive. The more massive a cluster is, the larger the effects of gravitational lensing.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency.