Thanks to the presence of a natural "zoom lens" in space, this is a close-up look at brightest distant "magnified" galaxy in the universe known to date.
It is one of the most striking examples of gravitational lensing, where the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy bends and amplifies the light of a more distant background galaxy.
In this image the light from a distant galaxy, nearly 10 billion light-years away, has been warped into a nearly 90-degree arc of light in the galaxy cluster RCS2 032727-132623.
The galaxy cluster lies 5 billion light-years away.
The background galaxy's image is 20 times larger and over three times brighter than typically lensed galaxies.
The natural colour image was taken in March 2011 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. Credit: NASA; ESA; J. Rigby (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center); and K. Sharon (Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago).
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