On December 14, Hubble Space Telescope officials released shocking images of an astronomical event called the “melted ring”. The Stars bezel, which appears as an elongated golden arc on a galaxy cluster of stars, is one of the largest and most complete Einstein rings ever found in our universe.
Named for the physicist, the Einstein ring appears when due to a process called gravitational lensing, light from the galaxy is rotated by a giant object on its way to Earth. If the observer, lens, and source are perfectly aligned, the light is stretched, and it looks like a ring. This happens because gravity turns the path of light; Very g ense, high-mass objects like black holes often create such distortions.
In this case, the “melted ring” is the nickname for a galaxy called GAL-CLUS-022058s, located in the southern constellation Fornex.
Saurabh Jha, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University, who is credited with the image, explained to Salon that the much-discussed image is an incredible example of gravity lensing.
“Most of the galaxies in the image you see are galaxies, each with a collection of hundreds of billions of stars,” Zhao said in an email. “The yellow-orange galaxies in the center of the image are part of a galaxy cluster; the largest, gravitationally bound objects in the universe are galaxy clusters.”
This is because most of the mass in the galaxy cluster comes from dark matter, Zai explained.
Zhao added that the image contains a galaxy that appears “stretched and distorted, almost wrapped around the cluster’s central galaxy.” This, he said, is “the mirage of gravity,” because in reality the galaxy is behind the central cluster galaxy, like “billions of light years ahead.”
He said, “The light of the background galaxy is bent its way through the gravity of its galaxy cluster so we see many images of the background galaxy.” “You can see an image of this background spiral galaxy in the upper right of the central galaxy: it’s mostly red, with a blue spiral arm.”
“On the left and below, you see more images of the same galaxy,” stretched with an almost elaborate ‘look’.
“In this case, the ring doesn’t extend all the way around, but almost,” he explained.
Zhao added that the image we are seeing is the result of a collaborative effort between several observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope, processed by Lew Schutz, and created by an earlier version. Judy Schmidt.
Astronomers first discovered the molten ring through observations from the Magellan Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. But this was a ground-based telescope, whose image clarity and depth of observation limited the depth at which Hubble entered. Since the Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope, it will be able to take better images of our universe without any interference. Light pollution and clouds.
“We knew this was going to be an interesting looking system, but were blown away by the amazing Hubble data,” Zhae said.
Zhao noted that the galaxy is a spiral galaxy similar to our own galaxy, although billions of light years away.
“That means we’re seeing the image of that galaxy billions of years ago, and so we can study what spiral galaxies were like a long time ago,” Zhao said. “What’s particularly nice about this system is that nature has given us a global ‘magnifying glass’ – a gravitational lens that we can study this particular constellation better than we can.”
