cosmic snake tagged posts

The Cosmic Snake is the image of a distant galaxy, deflected by a strong gravitational lens. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, A.Cava

Asronomers have studied the image of a distant galaxy, 6 billion light-years away from us, warped and stretched by strong gravitational lensing into the shape of a cosmic snake. We have a fair understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that regulate star formation in galaxies, from the interstellar matter to the diffuse clouds distributed in space, whose gravitational contraction leads to the birth of stars within large stellar clusters. But observations of distant galaxies have questioned this picture, the size and mass of these distant stellar nurseries largely exceeding that of their local counterparts...