NASA’s Hubble captured an Einstein Ring a year ago, and thanks to further research, scientists have now been able to calculate how old it is and extract more details about this cosmic oddity. As the name makes it quite clear, Albert Einstein was the first to hypothesize the existence of such objects that are created due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. It is somewhat similar to curved mirrors distorting how objects look, except, in this case, it happens on a much larger scale in space.
The concept isn’t too technical, though. When an object with a strong gravitational pull sits between the source and observer, it distorts the light coming from the source and creates optical illusions for the observer. In the case of an Einstein Ring, the bending of light creates an optical illusion that manifests in the form of a massive ring in space. Sometimes, the alignment of the gravitational distorting body and the light source is so perfect that the source appears much larger than it actually is, allowing scientists to study it in more detail.
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The above photo captured by Hubble actually depicts one of the largest, nearly complete Einstein Rings ever seen. The object has been labeled GAL-CLUS 022058s and the light coming from it has actually been magnified by a factor of 20, thanks to gravitational lensing. And due to its appearance, scientists have given it a fitting nickname — the Molten Ring. Interestingly, the form in which the galaxy is depicted must have existed some 9 billion years ago, and the revived Hubble Space Telescope is only seeing it now because of how far away the light source is.
A Relic From The Booming Era Of Star Formation
Once the Hubble-captured picture of this Einstein Ring was released, more research followed to unravel the mystery. Scientists created a gravitational lensing model to study the effects of this space phenomenon to know more about the physical characteristics of the galaxy that appears magnified in the picture. Thanks to data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists determined the light coming from the source has traveled approximately 9.4 billion light-years. This was done by detecting the molecular gas and the Red Shift (a measurement of how much the wavelength of light has been stretched) in this case.
Nikolaus Sulzenauer, a research student at the Max Plank Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and also a member of the team behind this study, mentioned that the galaxy shown in the Molten Ring is a regular galaxy with active star formation. Moreover, the galaxy appears to have spiral arms, regions where star formation tends to happen actively. As for the location, GAL-CLUS 022058s is situated in a southern hemisphere constellation called Fornax that contains four stars and translates to a furnace in Latin. Quite a fitting name for a constellation that hosts an object carrying the nickname “Molten Ring.”
