On December 14th, Hubble Space Telescope officials I showed Amazing photos of an astronomical phenomenon called a „molten ring“. The object, which appears as a golden arc extending across a dense cluster of stars, is one of the largest and most complete objects Einstein’s rings Discover our world.

The Einstein ring, named after the physicist, appears when light is diverted from the galaxy by a massive object on its way to Earth, due to a process called gravitational lensing. If the observer, lens, and source are aligned perfectly, the light is stretched and appears like a loop. This happens because gravity bends the path of light; High mass objects such as black holes often create such distortions.

In this case, „Molten Ring“ is a pseudonym for a galaxy officially called GAL-CLUS-022058s, which is located in the southern constellation Fornax.

Saurap Jha, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University who is credited with the image, explained to Salon that the photo he talks about a lot is a great example of a gravitational lens.

„Most of the things you see in the image are galaxies, groups of hundreds of billions of stars each,“ Jha said in an email. „The yellowish-orange galaxies near the center of the image are part of a group of galaxies; clusters of galaxies are among the massive gravitational-related objects in the universe.“

This is because most of the mass in the galaxy cluster comes from dark matter, Jha explained.

Jha added that in the image there is a single galaxy that appears „extended and distorted, and nearly wraps around the central galaxy of the cluster.“ This is a „gravitational mirage,“ he said, because it is actually the galaxy behind the central cluster galaxy – as it is in „billions of light-years distant.“

He said: „The light coming from the background of the galaxy bends its path due to the gravity of the huge galaxy cluster so that we see multiple images of the background galaxy.“ „You can see one image of this backward spiral galaxy in the upper right of the central galaxy: it’s mostly red and has a bluish spiral arm.“

On the left and bottom side, you see more images of the same galaxy, „stretched, in a semi-liquid“ appearance.

„In this case, the ring does not extend all the way, but rather extends approximately,“ he explained.

Jha added that the image we see is the result of a collaborative effort between several observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope, and processed by Leo Schatz, And an earlier version of the Judy Schmidt.

Astronomers first discovered the molten ring through observations in one of Magellan’s telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. But this was a ground-based telescope, which limited the clarity of the image and the depth of observations, which is the time Hubble stepped in. Since the Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope, it is able to take better pictures of our universe without interference from light pollution and clouds.

“We knew this was going to be an interesting system, but we were astonished by the amazing Hubble data,” said Jha.

Jha observed that the galaxy is a spiral galaxy like ours the Milky Way, despite billions of light-years.

„This means that we see a picture of that galaxy as it was billions of years ago, and so we can study it to see how spiral galaxies were long ago,“ said Jha. „The nice thing about this system is that nature has given us a cosmic“ magnifying glass „- the gravitational lens that allows us to study this particular galaxy in much finer detail than we could do otherwise.“