Scientists used a massive telescope to create an incredibly detailed image of a very distant galaxy through gravitational lensing.

The image, captured via the Atacma Large Millimetery Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile, depicts a magnified view of the galaxy, which is so remote that it wouldn’t have been viewable were it not for an effect known as gravitation lensing, according to a Business Standard report.

The observations are even more details than what could be produced by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and they provide a zoomed in view of the star-forming portions of the galaxy. The study was published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The image, reconstructed from ALMA’s Long Baseline Campaign thanks to the huge collecting area of the telescope, was captured in stunning detail. The ALMA telescope allows scientists to get amazingly detailed observations at the other end of the universe as they merge and lead to star formation.

Astronomers were also able to measure the rotation of the galaxy and its mass based on spectral information from ALMA. They believe that the galaxy’s gas is unstable and collapsing inwards, likely resulting in more star-forming regions.

Gravitational lensing refers to when the gravitational field between a very distant source and the absorber — such as a cluster of galaxies — causes a deep distortion in gravity so that it bends light around it, magnifying our view of an object far beyond it. It was one of the things Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts.

Using gravitational lensing, we can use a large galaxy cluster to observe something way beyond it. It usually appears as a ring around the object that astronomers are looking through.