Star city

The Sun - our local star - is one of an estimated 200 billion making up our 'star-city', the Galaxy.

Time paced out the slow, unending centuries, marked them by the revolution of the great, shining wheel of the galaxy, the giant star-city of a billion, billion suns.

The majority of the massive, or rich, clusters that are being formed now have tens of thousands of stars like our current population of globulars. Therefore, once completed they will look like these star cities.

Each arc has turned out to be the distorted image of a distant galaxy, focused by the gravity of the foreground star-city.