A team of scientists using the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft has made a groundbreaking discovery – an astonishing Einstein ring hidden in our cosmic backyard. The galaxy, NGC 6505, is approximately 590 million light-years away from Earth, making this finding both remarkable and accessible.
The ring, formed by the gravitational lensing effect predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, is created when light from a distant galaxy is bent around the foreground galaxy. This rare phenomenon was first observed by Euclid Archive Scientist Bruno Altieri in September 2023, who noticed a hint of the ring in an out-of-focus image.
The ring is made up of light from the far-away galaxy, which is 4.42 billion light-years away and has never been observed before. The alignment of the galaxies, combined with Euclid’s high-resolution instruments, allowed the team to detect the ring’s presence.
According to Conor O’Riordan, lead author of the scientific paper analyzing the ring, “Einstein rings are incredibly useful scientifically as they provide a rich laboratory for studying the expansion of the Universe, detecting dark matter and dark energy, and investigating background sources.” This discovery demonstrates Euclid’s power in finding new phenomena even in well-known galaxies.
Euclid is expected to map more than a third of the sky, observing billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away. The space telescope will detect around 100,000 strong lenses but has already revealed this stunning Einstein ring, making it an early highlight of its mission.
Source: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid/Euclid_discovers_a_stunning_Einstein_ring