The NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured what they describe as a “truly strange and very rare phenomenon” – the largest and one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered in our universe. The object GAL-CLUS-022058s – first theorized by Einstein in his general theory of relativity – has been nicknamed the ‘Molten Ring’ by astronomers who studied this Einstein ring, referring to its appearance in the southern hemisphere constellation Fornax ( The oven).
Einstein’s Gravitational Theory
The phenomenon of gravitational lenses cannot be explained without the general theory of relativity. Einstein’s theory of gravity, said to be the greatest achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relationships linking gravitational phenomena to the geometry of space, said the great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman.
The unusual shape and geometry of this object, as Einstein first theorized in his general theory of relativity, can be explained by a process called gravitational lensing, according to Hubble, whereby light shining from far away is bent and pulled by gravity . of an object between the source and the observer. In this case, the light from the background galaxy is distorted in the curve seen by the gravity of the galaxy cluster in front of it. The near-exact alignment of the background galaxy with the cluster’s central elliptical galaxy, seen in the center of this image, has distorted and enlarged the background galaxy image into a near-perfect ring. The gravity of other galaxies in the cluster causes additional distortions. “
Objects like these are ideal laboratories to study galaxies that are often too dim and too distant to see without gravitational lenses.
“Recent results from astronomers occasionally studying gravitational lenses of unknown worlds through intermediate stars,” says astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, “suggest that orphan planets may be at least as numerous as the stars. In other words, there could be hundreds of billions of orphaned worlds shuffling through our galaxy. “
The Daily Galaxy, Sam Cabot, via NASA
Image credit: ESA / Hubble & NASA, S.Jha)