Once again our Universe left us speechless. It seems like the Hubble telescope recently spotted a strange space phenomenon that has all space research institutes very interested.
If you aren’t familiar with the Hubble Space Telescope’s work, you should know that it has been orbiting Earth since 1990, and it is controlled by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). Hubble has made it possible to know different aspects of space, such as black holes.
Black holes are still the subject of several studies across the world, but they can be kind of understood thanks to Einstein’s relativity theory which states that these structures bend gravity, saying that light could be affected by it just like matter is and that is why they look like they suck everything that passes near them.
Hubble was able to notice that black holes are surrounded by different gases and it measures how much gas can get trapped or sucked by the hole and this led scientists to know how and how fast these things are born after two galaxies collide.
Still, the relativity theory and black holes are controversial topics among scientists, even though they have a strong base of followers, such as Stephen Hawking. That is why this new image caught by Hubble and published by the ESA is such a big deal.
The image showed a perfect circle with four bright spots that were surrounding two other glowing ones. This fascinating phenomenon called Einstein Ring is billions of lightyears away from Earth and it is formed by three different galaxies that create a ring together. Usually, this thing wouldn’t be seen by another space telescope, but apparently, the two galaxies in the center curved the light.
The turn of the light is reflected and magnified by the galaxies themselves when it passes through their gravitational fields, and this creates a sensation that the image repeats itself in five different spaces, four times in the ring and once in the center, and all of this combined creates the flawless ring. Even though they have been seen before, the forming of an Einstein Ring implies the perfect aligning of distant galaxies, so they are extremely rare to glance at.
Einstein Rings also make it possible to find different hidden aspects of the Universe, such as its depth, and how dark matter is distributed across space to create the galaxies. Albert Einstein actually predicted this phenomenon in 1915, but technology at the time wasn’t advanced enough to see them, still, they were named after the scientist.
