Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the most distant galaxy that acts as a cosmic magnifying glass.
The galaxy, which is 9.6 billion light-years away, could be the most distant such object known to science.
The results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The galaxy was found during observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope, according to the study. It is big enough to magnify an even more distant galaxy 10.7 billion light-years away, due to what is known as gravitational lensing.
"It's very difficult to see an alignment between two galaxies in the early universe. Imagine holding a magnifying glass close to you and then moving it much farther away," Kim-Vy Tran of Texas A&M University in College Station said, according to Space.com.
Through lensing, the field of a massive foreground object warps, bends, and magnifies the light from more distant objects.
This can reveal extremely far and dim galaxies that astronomers would not be able to see normally.
"When you look through a magnifying glass held at arm's length, the chances that you will see an enlarged object are high. But if you move the magnifying glass across the room, your chances of seeing the magnifying glass nearly perfectly aligned with another object beyond it diminishes," Tran said.
The magnifying galaxy belongs to a distant galaxy cluster known as IRC 0218.
It is approximately 180 billion times larger than our Sun, and is 9.6 light-years away. It breaks the previous record-holder for the most distant lensing galaxy by 200 million years, according to NASA.
The team thinks that the lensing galaxy continued to grow over the last 9 billion years by gaining dark matter and gaining stars from cannibalizing neighboring galaxies, according to the study.
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