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On December 14, officials at the Hubble Space Telescope revealed striking images of an astronomical phenomenon called the “Ring of Fusion.” The object, which appears as a golden arc stretched across a dense cluster of stars, is one of the largest and most complete Einstein rings ever discovered in our universe.
Named after the physicist, an Einstein ring appears when, due to a process called the gravitational lens, light from a galaxy is deflected by a massive object on its way to Earth. If the viewer, lens, and source are all perfectly aligned, the light is stretched out and appears as a ring. This happens because gravity bends the path of light; very dense and high mass objects like black holes often create such distortions.
In this case, the “Molten Ring” is the nickname of a galaxy officially named GAL-CLUS-022058s, located in the southern constellation of Fornax.
Saurabh Jha, professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University, credited for the image, told Salon that the much-talked-about image is an incredible example of a gravitational lens.
“Most of the objects you see in the image are galaxies, collections of hundreds of billions of stars each,” Jha said in an email. “The yellowish-orange galaxies near the middle of the image are part of a galaxy cluster; galaxy clusters are among the most massive and gravitational-bound objects in the Universe.”
That’s because most of the mass of a galaxy cluster comes from dark matter, Jha explained.
Jha added that in the image, there is a galaxy that appears to be “stretched out and warped, almost wrapping around the central galaxy in the cluster.” It’s a “gravitational mirage,” he said, because in reality the galaxy is behind the central cluster galaxy – as in “billions of light years away.”
“The light from the background galaxy has its trajectory bent by the gravity of the massive cluster of galaxies so that we see multiple images of the background galaxy,” he said. “You can see an image of this background spiral galaxy at the top right of the central galaxy: it is predominantly red, with a bluish spiral arm.”
On the left side and below you see more images of that same galaxy, “stretched out, with an almost“ liquefied ”appearance,” he said.
“In this case, the ring doesn’t extend all around, 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, processed by Leo Shatz, and a previous version was made by Judy Schmidt.
Astronomers first discovered the fusion ring through observations at one of the Magellan telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. But it was a telescope on the ground, limiting the clarity of the image and the depth of the observations, that’s when the Hubble stepped in. Since the Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope, it is able to take better images of our universe without interference from light pollution and clouds.
“We knew this system was going to be interesting, but we were blown away by the incredible data from Hubble,” Jha said.
Jha noted that the galaxy is a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way galaxy, albeit billions of light years away.
“This means that we see the image of this galaxy as it was billions of years ago, so we can study it to see what spiral galaxies looked like so long ago,” said said Jha. “What’s particularly nice about this system is that nature has given us a cosmic ‘magnifying glass’ – the gravitational lens’ which allows us to study this particular galaxy in much more detail than we could possibly imagine. doing otherwise.”
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