James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

MACS J0417.5-1154 Wide Field (plus Question Mark Galaxy) (NIRCam)

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, which 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, with 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. See more detail in the question mark galaxy here and see the repeated images of the galaxies labeled here. Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Vicente Estrada-Carpenter (Saint Mary's University) Image description: At the center of a field of many colorful galaxies, three elongated red galaxies curve around to approximate the shape of the top of a question mark. Another reddish galaxy appears in about the right position to be the dot of the question mark. A bright white, oval foreground galaxy draws the eye from its position right next to the question mark shape. Image & Description by NASA