© NASA Goddard / YouTube
The vivid galaxy cluster Abell S1063, located some 4 billion light-years away, holds the key to this staggering phenomenon.
Its immense mass causes a mesmerizing distortion of distance by the 'bending' of light. This gravitational lensing allows us to view galaxies well beyond the cluster, which would otherwise be impossible to see.
Abell S1063 is home to...wait for it...100 million-million solar masses, including stars and nebulae and potentially more than 450 galaxies.
If it all sounds a little Star Treky, that's because it is. Katrina Jackson of NASA's Goddard Flight Center credits the hit series with inspiring and encouraging many fans to explore space's 'final frontier' in greater detail. Indeed the Hubble pictures have been released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the franchise and the release of the latest movie.
The images provide a view of the early universe and it's now possible to see a 'baby' galaxy as it was 1 billion years after the big bang.
This initiative, which is part of the Frontier Fields program, outdoes the Hubble Deep Field Images project of 1994 and Hubble Ultra Deep Field images of 2004 - but the James Webb Space Telescope will show things with even more clarity when it launches in 2018.
NASA believes that by magnifying and studying the distant galaxies, they will better understand "mysterious dark matter that comprises most of the mass of the universe."
How many "final frontiers" must there be before the bleedin' obvious is realized that the Universe is infinite and, overall, in Steady State - no "Big Bang".
Each time observation improves the purported "size" of the Universe increases and the "age" is revised upwards ... it's farce!
Consider the analogy of a vast forest - say a mega Amazon - with the trees representing stars, so that at any given location a tree and its ecosystem is dying, whereas elsewhere a new tree is growing, i.e. locally there are endings and beginnings, but overall the forest remains essentially the same.
Now consider a forest dweller who is familiar with a certain area and who thinks this is THE forest, but then one day he wanders farther afield and discovers more of the same; rinse and repeat until it dawns on him that the forest is effectively endless, with nothing special about his original location.
OK our solar system is in an outer portion of our spiral galaxy, which is rotating at a significant percentage of the speed of light, such that it appears that other galaxies are moving away from us and there is a red shift consequently ... but really, relative to the centre of our galaxy, nothing is going anywhere, let alone expanding ... we remain effectively as geo (ego!!) centric as when it was believed that our Planet was at the centre of this solar system. It's a serious case of "the observer distorting the data".
Now imagine being transported to the current "final frontier" ... looking back our galaxy would appear to be "the final frontier", whilst looking forward there would appear to be another "final frontier". Thus a person might conclude that the Universe had doubled in "size", or he might realize that he could repeat the same experiment endlessly in all directions. QED the Universe is infinite and that - as Kant realized - "time" and "space" are the prime factors of consciousness and NOT external virtual properties.
OK I'll leave it at that, the core realizations I came by over thirty years ago, since when I've forgotten some of the maths I used and some additional propositions.