Wide-field View: Distant 'Question Mark' Galaxy Pair | Webb Telescope

Wide-field View: Distant 'Question Mark' Galaxy Pair | Webb Telescope

A cosmic question mark appears amid a powerful gravitational lens in the James Webb Space Telescope’s wide-field view of the galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154. Gravitational lensing occurs when something is so massive, like this galaxy cluster, that it warps the fabric of space-time itself, creating a natural funhouse-mirror effect that also magnifies galaxies behind it. 

The rarely seen type of lensing captured here that astronomers term hyperbolic umbilic, created five repeated images of one galaxy pair. The red, elongated member of this pair traces the familiar shape of a question mark across the sky due to the distortion. Another unrelated galaxy happening to be in just the right space-time to appear like the question mark’s dot—especially for humans who love to recognize familiar shapes and patterns. 

The Webb images and spectra in this research came from the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS). The research paper is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/532/1/577/7686125

Image Credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), STScI, Vicente Estrada-Carpenter (Saint Mary's University)

Release Date: Sept. 4, 2024

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