Seeing quintuple! In this video, four dots of light seeming | ASTRONOMY
Seeing quintuple!
In this video, four dots of light seemingly surround a pair of dots in the middle. The middle pair is two giant galaxies. The outer four dots (and a fifth in the very center that is hard to make out) are actually images of the same quasar, an extremely luminous object created when gas and dust fall into a supermassive black hole and emit electromagnetic radiation.
The quasar, known as 2M1310-1714, appears as five points due to gravitational lensing, a phenomenon where an enormous mass (like this galaxy pair) warps the fabric of space, causing light (traveling here from the quasar, through the galaxy pair) to bend around the mass. On Earth, we observe multiple, magnified images of the quasar, which is actually located far beyond the galaxy pair.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Treu; Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
Music credit: “Universe” by Andrew John Stuart-Buttle [PRS], Edward Alexander Martin [PRS], Frederick James Hills [PRS], Michael Thomas Peter Baker [PRS], Oliver Richard HInkins [PRS], and Thomas Edward Anderson [PRS] via Ninja Tune Production Music [PRS] and Universal Production Music
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