#einstein ring

In a stunning confirmation of general relativity, the James Webb Space Telescope has captured one of the universe’s most elegant phenomena: a near-perfect Einstein ring ❣️💛❤️

This glowing cosmic halo, formed around galaxy cluster SMACS J0028.2-7537, is the result of gravitational lensing—where massive foreground galaxies bend the light of a more distant galaxy behind them.

When the background galaxy, the foreground lens, and Earth align just right, light stretches into a luminous ring—a sight Einstein predicted in 1936 but called “unobservable” due to technological limits of his time. Now, nearly a century later, JWST has proven him wrong.

Using its unmatched infrared vision, JWST revealed the intricate structure of the ring, created by a Milky Way-like galaxy billions of light-years away.

Closest Einstein Ring Detected

NGC 6505 isn't something new to science, it was first spotted in 1884, finding it's way into the NGC catalogue, but it's only now that the galaxy 600 million light years from Earth, has been seen to be bending the light of an object directly behind it, but 6 billion light years away.

Look closely towards the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy, and the ring is revealed.

The finding comes from the new Euclid telescope, and from a group looking at the very first bits of data coming from it. One lead scientist has said, there was probably a 1 in 3 chance of finding something out there like this, across the entire lifetime of Euclid, but to find it in the very first data was beyond their dreams.

It took two perfectly aligned galaxies to form this Einstein Ring:

The closer, massive one at the center is warping the light from the more distant galaxy behind it, transforming its spiral arms into multiple swirls.

An Einstein Ring forms when a (relatively) nearby, massive object bends light from a more distant one that's aligned from our POV.

The name honors Albert Einstein, whose general theory of relativity predicts that light will bend and brighten around particularly massive objects in space (such as galaxies and galaxy clusters), turning their gravity into cosmic magnifying glasses that bring extremely distant objects into view via an effect called gravitational lensing.

From SpaceTelescope.Org Picture of the Week; April 2, 2018:

Cosmic Cloning

This image is packed full of galaxies! A keen eye can spot exquisite ellipticals and spectacular spirals, seen at various orientations: edge-on with the plane of the galaxy visible, face-on to show off magnificent spiral arms, and everything in between. The vast majority of these specks are galaxies, but to spot a foreground star from our own galaxy, you can look for a point of light with tell-tale diffraction spikes.

The most alluring subject sits at the center of the frame. With the charming name of SDSSJ0146-0929, the glowing central bulge is a galaxy cluster — a monstrous collection of hundreds of galaxies all shackled together in the unyielding grip of gravity. The mass of this galaxy cluster is large enough to severely distort the spacetime around it, creating the odd, looping curves that almost encircle the cluster.

These graceful arcs are examples of a cosmic phenomenon known as an Einstein ring. The ring is created as the light from a distant objects, like galaxies, pass by an extremely large mass, like this galaxy cluster. In this image, the light from a background galaxy is diverted and distorted around the massive intervening cluster and forced to travel along many different light paths towards Earth, making it seem as though the galaxy is in several places at once.