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EnumeratedArray t1_jb76qvm wrote

Gonna need someone to ELI5 this one for me. That's incredible but way over my head

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jeffwillden t1_jb79116 wrote

The galaxy drove to work, but took 3 different routes. One route had extra gravitational stop lights which caused it to arrive 320 days late. And another one 1000 days late. The fastest route was relatively direct though. We get to see all three in one picture.

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f_d t1_jb7g4dm wrote

The light from the galaxy, not the galaxy itself.

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WyboSF t1_jb7ik45 wrote

That’s the same thing when it comes to an image and how we are collecting the data

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f_d t1_jb7qrxa wrote

It's not the same thing as the galaxy itself moving, though. And it's much easier to understand how light can take different paths than a galaxy taking different paths. I wanted to make extra clear what was doing the traveling in the analogy.

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undeleted_username t1_jba0ter wrote

Due to gravitational lensing, the light from the galaxy took three different routes to reach us, so we see the same galaxy three times on the same picture; also, as each route has a different length, light took a different amount of time to reach us.

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