The Hubble Space Telescope has been using huge galactic clusters for creating natural cosmic lenses to enhance its observing powers. Hubble has come up with its own view of the final frontier.

The Abell S1063 galaxy cluster has been forming a dazzling scene at around four billion light-years away. The cluster’s sheer mass has corralled light from galaxies existing way further Hubble's observing abilities, leading to the formation of those strange-looking arcs and warped galactic shapes.

The light coming from these distant galaxies travels via the cluster, but because the space-time around the cluster has its mass wrapping, the light gets deflected. Far away objects are magnified by such cosmic lenses, enhancing the already impressive magnification of Hubble. This is called gravitational lensing, which was Einstein's theory of general relativity’s direct prediction.

The exciting thing is that Abell S1063 includes pictures of 16 background galaxies and one of such primordial galaxies were there just a billion years after the Big Bang. This ancient specimen belongs to the first generation of galaxies that appeared in the universe, thus its light took about 13 billion years to pass from that galaxy, via the Abell S1063 cluster’s space-time magnification and into Hubble's lens.

The sight of galaxies from the universe’s dawn is a scientific goldmine in itself, but calculations and measurements of their distorted shapes can aid astronomers in mapping dark matter distribution in the cluster, helping them in further refining their theories on what this baffling mass can possibly be.

The latest observation is under Hubble's Frontier Fields program that has actually been pushing the envelope for the veteran telescope. With the help of combining Hubble's unobstructed view of the seen universe and the quirk of general relativity, scientists have been learning a lot about the early universe, spying a few galaxies that were present just some hundred million years after the universe’s birth and offering persuasive latest clues about the nature of some of the largest mysteries beyond the present cosmological understanding.