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The 40-kilometer diameter unnamed crater (49 degrees North, 21 degrees East) in this image is located west of Lyot Crater and north of Deuteronilus Mensae in the Northern Plains of Mars. As seen in the subimage, gully systems in the central structure have eroded underlying layers (undercutting) that are less resistant to erosion than the surface rock of the central structure. Previous channelized water flows likely transported the eroded sediments toward the southeast and deposited them forming the expansive debris aprons. The formation of channels on the debris aprons supports the hypothesis that these sediments were transported down the gullies and then deposited onto the aprons by flowing water. In the larger, northernmost system, sediments have partially filled in the channel segments and winds have remobilized these sediments forming the dunes that line the gullies. Written by: Ginny Gulick Credits: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
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Thanks to the presence of a natural \"zoom lens\" in space, this is a close-up look at the brightest distant \"magnified\" galaxy in the universe known to date. It is one of the most striking examples of gravitational lensing, where the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy bends and amplifies the light of a more distant background galaxy. In this image the light from a distant galaxy, nearly 10 billion light-years away, has been warped into a nearly 90-degree arc of light in the galaxy cluster RCS2 032727-132623. The galaxy cluster lies 5 billion light-years away. The background galaxy\'s image is over three times brighter than typically lensed galaxies. The natural-color image was taken in March 2011 with the Hubble Space Telescope\'s Wide Field Camera 3. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Rigby (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), K. Sharon (Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago), and M. Gladders and E. Wuyts (University of Chicago)
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