A stunning 2020 Hubble image reveals new science that illuminates the story behind a glowing loop of light.
After Einstein, the famous physicist, the circle is also known as an Einstein ring. It was created due to a galactic illusion. This galaxy, also known as the "molten circle", is called GAL-CLUS - 022058s. It is located in the Southern Hemisphere constellation Of Fornax.
According to scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope, the big circle is actually a light smear that results from a lensing effect. This occurs when a distant galaxy's light is magnified by the gravity of the foreground object. New research indicates that the galaxy visible in the ring is as old as the universe itself, which was approximately 9 billion years ago. This was when the universe was just one-third its age of 13.8 trillion years.
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Image from the Hubble Space Telescope showing one of the most comprehensive Einstein rings scientists have ever studied. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA/S. Jha/Acknowledgement: L. Shatz)
"Detection of molecular gas, from which new stars are born allowed us to calculate redshift and thus give us confidence that we truly are looking at a very far galaxy," Nikolaus, a Ph.D. student in Germany at the Max Plank Institute for Radio Astronomy, stated in a statement by the European Space Agency (which partners with NASA) in a statement.
"This was the time when the universe went through a baby boom', forming thousands upon thousands of stars at an incredibly rapid rate. According to the Hubble statement, the magnified image of the galaxies gives astronomers a closer look into the distant past.
Scientists said that this photo, which was first published in 2020, was the largest Einstein ring ever catalogued. Astronomers used archive data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large telescope to determine the distance of the galaxy at 9.4 billion light years. Further analysis provided clues to the evolution of the galaxy by allowing the team to study the stellar clumps made up of matter within the lensed galaxies.
"The star formation rate in the brightest, most dusty galaxies was so high that stars were being formed at a rate thousand times faster than what occurs in our galaxy. "This could explain the rapid growth of giant elliptical galaxy clusters today," Hubble officials stated in the same statement.
Saurabh Jha of Rutgers State University of New Jersey made the initial Hubble observation. Anastasio Daz-Snchez of Universidad Politcnica de Cartagena, Spain, was the lead investigator of new research modeling the formation of the galaxy.
