After Cosmic Rose, NASA Hubble captures Einstein Ring, which is caused due to the bending of light by intense gravity.
NASA’S Hubble telescope captures the “Einstein Ring” – 3.4 billion light-years away from Earth, which is a phenomenon named after the great scientist Albert Einstein, who had claimed that light could be bend by gravity.
Einstein’s Prediction
This cosmic show is known as Gravitational Lensing. It occurs when the gravitational field from a massive object in space warps space and deflects light from a distant object behind it, forming “Einstein Ring” or Bull’s eye pattern.
This phenomenon had already been predicted by Albert Einstein, A famed Physicist, in 1911 that gravity would affect light similarly as it affects the physical matter.
In 1915, Einstein had proposed the idea as a test to his theory of general relativity, which was confirmed by the British astronomer Arthur Eddington in 1919, during a solar eclipse on the island of Principe near the west coast of Africa.
Eddington observed that the stars near the eclipsed disk appeared fractionally out of place because the Sun’s gravity bent their light.
Telescopes, during Einstein’s time, were not capable of detecting any other signs of the phenomenon.
Astronomers at the Kitt Peak Observatory of Arizona in 1979 first saw this phenomenon as the Twin Quasar QSO 0957+561, a single quasar that looks like two from Earth because it’s image is “gravitationally lensed” by a closer but unseen galaxy.
The Phenomenon
The circular object at the centre of the image released is three galaxies that appear as 7, with four separate images of the most distant galaxies forming the ring around the others.
With a gigantic black hole at the centre known as a quasar, the farthest galaxy is 15 billion light-years away from Earth. At such a great distance, it is almost invisible to even the best telescopes.
Its light is covered by the two galaxies in front of it, which is about 3 billion light-years away, so its image appears to us in five different places- four times in the ring and once at the centre of the ring, forming a part of the Einstein Ring.
“The Einstein Rings and Einstein Crosses are presumably evidence of more material in the closer galaxies than meets the eye, and that most likely means dark matter,” said Ed Krupp, an astronomer and the director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles and added that Their distribution could “help illuminate the identity and distribution of dark matter and the relativistic geometry of the whole universe.”
