English: This Hubble Space Telescope image shows galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1-2403, located roughly 4 billion light-years away and weighing as much as a million billion suns. This giant cluster acts as a powerful natural lens by bending and magnifying the light of far-more-distant objects behind it.
MACS J0416 was found to magnify the light of a tiny galaxy that existed about 400 million years after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. The object was nicknamed Tayna, which means "first-born" in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America.
Like a zoom lens on a camera, the cluster's gravity boosts the light of this distant "protogalaxy" to make it look 20 times brighter than normal. The phenomenon is called gravitational lensing and was proposed by Albert Einstein as part of his General Theory of Relativity.
MACS J0416 is part of the Frontier Fields program, in which Hubble teamed up with NASA's other Great Observatories to probe the early universe by studying large galaxy clusters.
For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2015-45
Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Infante (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)