NASA Hubble Clicks Amazing 'Molten Einstein Ring' 60 Million Light-Years Away

NASA and ESA¡¯s Hubble Space Telescope has yet again managed to find another wonder of the cosmic universe. This time, the space telescope managed to capture a very rare event which is now being called a "Molten Ring" by astronomers.

Molten (Einstein) Ring (Image: NASA/ Hubble)

The image, recently shared by NASA, depicts GAL-CLUS-022058s, an Einstein ring located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Fornax (the Furnace), around 60 million light-years from Earth. In a note on NASA website, ESA explains that the GAL-CLUS-022058s is ¡°the largest and one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered in our universe.¡±

Einstein rings were first theorized to exist by Einstein in his general theory of relativity. They are formed by gravitational lensing, a process which causes distortions in light travelling from far away due to the effect of gravity from an object placed in the middle of the source and the observer of the light.

In an image of the Einstein Ring shared by NASA, the light from the background galaxy can be seen as distorted due to gravitational lensing. The note by ESA mentions that this effect in this case is caused by the gravity of the galaxy cluster sitting in front of the background galaxy.

NASA

What¡¯s more, the background galaxy is almost exactly aligned with the central elliptical galaxy of the cluster seen in the centre of this image. This causes the light from the background galaxy to warp and its image is hence magnified ¡°into an almost perfect ring.¡± Additional distortions are caused by the gravity from other galaxies in the cluster.

The resulting visual resembles a ¡°Molten Ring¡± and astronomers have hence nicknamed it as such. ESA says that such objects are ¡°ideal laboratories'' to study galaxies that are too far away from Earth. Since the distance makes them faint in appearance, these galaxies are nearly impossible to see without gravitational lensing.