On December 14, Hubble Space Telescope officials unveiled striking images of an astronomical phenomenon called the “molten ring”. The object, which appears as a golden arc stretched over a dense star cluster, is one of the largest and most complete Einstein rings ever discovered in our universe.
An Einstein ring, named after the physicist, appears when light from a galaxy is diverted by a massive object en route to Earth due to a process called gravitational lens. When the observer, lens and source are perfectly aligned, the light is stretched and looks like a ring. It occurs because gravity bends the path of light; very dense objects with large masses, such as black holes, often cause such distortions.
In this case, the “fused ring” is a nickname for a galaxy officially called GAL-CLUS-022058s, located in the southern constellation Fornax.
Saurabh Jha, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University who is credited for the image, explained to Salon that the much-discussed image is an incredible example of a gravitational lens.
“Most of the objects you see in the picture are galaxies, collections of hundreds of billions of stars each,” Jha said in an email. ‘The yellow-orange galaxies near the center of the image are part of a galaxy; galaxies are one of the most massive, gravity-bound objects in the universe. ‘
This is because most of the mass in a galaxy comes from dark matter, Jha explained.
Jha added that in the image there is one galaxy that looks ‘stretched and twisted’ and almost wraps around the central galaxy of the group. It is a ‘gravity mirage’, he said, because in reality the galaxy is behind the central cluster system – as in ‘billions of light years away’.
“The light from the background system has bent its orbit through the gravity of the massive galaxy, so we are seeing several images of the background system,” he said. “You can see one image of this background spiral system at the top right of the central galaxy: it’s mostly red, with a bluish spiral arm.”
On the left and below, you see more images of the same galaxy, ‘stretched out, with an almost’ liquid ‘appearance, “he said.
“In this case, the ring does not stretch completely, but almost,” 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, edited by Leo Shatz, and a previous version was made by Judy Schmidt.
Astronomers first discovered the Melted Ring through observations at one of the Magellan’s telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. But it was a telescope on the ground that limited the brightness of the image and the depth of observations, that’s when the Hubble entered. Since the Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope, it can take better pictures of our universe without interference from light pollution and clouds.
“We knew it would be an interesting system, but we were amazed by the incredible Hubble data,” Jha said.
Jha remarked that the galaxy is a spiral system like our own Milky Way galaxy, even though it is billions of light-years away.
“It means we see the image of that galaxy as it was billions of years ago, and so we can study it to see how spiral galaxies were so long ago,” Jha said. “What’s particularly nice about this system is that nature has given us a cosmic ‘magnifying glass’ – the gravitational lens ‘with which we can study this particular galaxy much more finely than we could otherwise.’