Gravity warps space in strange ways, and the bigger the source of gravity, the bigger will be the warping. One such example of gravity’s optical illusions is beautiful rings in space called Einstein rings, one of which was recently snapped by the legendary Hubble Space Telescope.
Einstein predicted gravity’s strange stretching influence on space, studying rings like the one seen in the image can enable scientists to peek into very distant places, seeing a galaxy as it looked over 9 billion years ago.
Gravitational lensing made it possible
The object might appear like a ring, but the source of light is actually a regular old galaxy. The ring shape appears dues to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, where the light from the distant galaxy is warped by the gravity of a galaxy cluster in between.
Not only this phenomenon changes the apparent shape of the galaxy, but it also magnifies and brightens it. The galaxy can be seen 20 times brighter due to the lensing effect, which allowed the space telescope to capture it with the equivalent of an enormous 48-meter-aperture telescope.
This particular ring is formally called GAL-CLUS-022058s, but it also has a nickname: The Molten Ring, which is appropriately located in the constellation of Fornax, The image snapped by the Hubble telescope has been since studied by the researchers using other tools including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) FORS instrument.
Going back in time
By looking at the ring, scientists can understand a very distant galaxy, looking back in time to when the universe was less than half its current age. This is the same period where many stars were formed.
“The lensed galaxy is one of the brightest galaxies in the millimeter wavelength regime,” said Helmut Dannerbauer, one of the authors. “Our research has also shown that it is a normal star-forming galaxy (a so-called main sequence galaxy) at the peak epoch of star formation in the Universe.”
Recently, Hubble researchers also revisited the AG Carinae star to show it from two different perspectives, compiled using data from 2020, 2014, and 1994.
