Natural telescope sets new magnification record

An international team of astronomers has discovered one of the most extreme instances of magnification by gravitational lensing. Using the Hubble Space Telescope to survey a sample of huge clusters of galaxies, the team found a distant galaxy, eMACSJ1341-QG-1, that is magnified 30 times thanks to the distortion of space-time created by the massive galaxy cluster dubbed eMACSJ1341.9-2441.