The ring closest to all time, picked up by the Euclid space telescope from the European Space Agency
ESA
Astronomers have identified the nearest Einstein ring, a rare phenomenon where the light of a larger galaxy is folded by the gravity of a galaxy closer to the earth. The ring was previously considered a galaxy and was identified over 100 years ago.
Galactic lenses like this, which are the closest astronomers ever found, were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1936 from his theory of general relativity. At the time, he thought that such an effect would be impossible to observe. In fact, he could have seen one if he had just had a sufficiently powerful telescope. “It was there from the start, but we had no idea,” said Thomas Collett At the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom.
Collett and his team realized that the Galaxy NGC 6505 in the form of an oval, which is around 600 million light years of the earth and was spotted for the first time in 1884, actually folded the light of a second galaxy behind, about 6 billion light years from the earth.
A close -up of the Einstein ring
ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA, Image processing by J.-C. Cuiller, T. Li
Team member Bruno Altieri At the European Space Agency, observed the Einstein ring while validating the early test data from the Euclid telescope, which recently started scanning billions of galaxies in an area that will eventually run a third of the night sky. “There was this abundantly obvious Einstein ring. There are not many things in the universe that can produce a ring like this, ”explains Collett.
“We expected about 1 in 3 chance of finding something as spectacular as it is on the entire investigation,” he said. “To find it, in the first time the first data, is spectacularly lucky. It is probably the prettiest lens that we will find in the mission.”
The ring itself is exceptionally brilliant compared to most Einstein rings we know, says Collett, partly because it is very close to us, but also because of Euclid's imaging capacities. “It's like someone with a bad view to put their glasses,” says Collett. This allows you to see the four images of the distant galaxy more easily. The light orange light surrounding the lively ring is the lens galaxy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5GSYQZSUT8
Having a ring of Einstein so close to the earth will allow us to test relativity in a way that we cannot with other distant goals, says Collett, because they can measure the mass of the galaxy in two ways: using the amount of light folds and the speed of the stars, which are often too far to measure with precision. The general relativity of Einstein says that these masses should be the same, so any difference could suggest our theory of gravity must be modified.
When Collett and his colleagues measured the mass of the lentil galaxy, they also found a slightly higher number than what should be possible from the estimated number of stars in the galaxy. This could be due to the fact that dark matter includes in the center of the galaxy, says Frédéric Dux At the Southern European Observatory, although we should find many more Einstein lenses to confirm, he said.
