Hubble Sees Dark Matter Distorting Galaxies

While astronomers are spending a lot of time and effort looking for traces of dark matter, those investigating the deep Universe are seeing the gravitational effects it causes on a massive scale. The latest example is this view captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The Great Observatory managed to snap this view of the distant galaxy cluster MACS J1206. The photo reveals how massive amounts of dark matter are distorting the galaxies within the cluster, causing them to deviate from the courses that they would usually take.

One of the main things that researchers first notices about this galaxy cluster when they discovered it was that it produced a vast degree of gravitational lensing. This is a phenomenon that distorts light as photons pass through intense gravitational fields, such as those around black holes.

Around this particular cluster, gravitational lensing is so strong that it produces several multiple images of the same galaxies. Such an occurrence is very rare, due to the fact that a large amount of matter needs to be present to produce the effect, Space reports.