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Herschel - already one of the most powerful astronomical tools ever built - has been further enhanced due to a neat trick of gravity which allows the telescope to use the gravity of a huge cluster of galaxies to study in detail an even more distant object. This is made possible due to the cosmic 'zoom lens' magnifying the light of the background galaxy.

This background galaxy is seen just a couple of billion years after the Big Bang, and Professor Seb Oliver from the University of Sussex described how: "we are seeing back to an epoch of really important star formation."

The 'lens' is the colossal aggregation Abell 2218 in the northern constellation Draco, and has been used by the Herschel telescope before for precisely this purpose. Its huge concentration of matter distorts and maximises the light from the objects that sit behind it. This works as a zoom as a beautiful consequence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Dr Michael Zemcov of the California Institute of Technology says: "Images like this (have) opened up the possibility of observing at sub-mm wavelengths in a way that was just not possible before; this kind of clarity is unprecedented at these wavelengths.

"Now that these data are available to the entire astronomical community, we will really be able to test our understanding of objects like galaxy clusters and, more profoundly, the formation of structure in the Universe from soon after the Big Bang right up to the present day."

The new imagery is part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES), a project to study the evolution of galaxies in the distant Universe.

The full news story, complete with imagery can be found on the BBC website.

More information about the HerMES project can be found on the ESA website.