Euclid telescope captures rare Einstein ring, revealing hidden galaxy
text_fields
The Euclid space telescope has captured a rare Einstein ring, showcasing the extreme warping of space caused by a nearby galaxy’s gravity, as it reveals the light from a distant galaxy hidden behind it.
The image highlights the gravitational lensing effect predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, where massive objects bend light around them, forming luminous rings that provide crucial insights into the universe’s hidden structures.
The photograph features NGC 6505, a galaxy situated 590 million light-years from Earth, encircled by a near-perfect ring of light originating from a background galaxy positioned 4.42 billion light-years away.
This phenomenon enables astronomers to observe distant objects that would otherwise remain obscured, while also offering estimates of the mass of the intervening galaxy, including any hidden components such as dark matter.
In this instance, the foreground galaxy is estimated to contain approximately 11% dark matter, which is relatively low considering dark matter’s dominant role in the universe’s overall mass.
As part of the European Space Agency’s €1bn Euclid mission, which aims to map the cosmos in unprecedented detail, the discovery underscores the telescope’s ability to uncover new structures even within well-documented celestial bodies.
The mission seeks to unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, which together constitute 95% of the universe, by creating the largest-ever 3D map of cosmic structures spanning distances of up to 10 billion light-years.
Although the telescope’s primary objective is to observe distant galaxies, its remarkable imaging precision is revealing new features within the nearby universe as well. The Einstein ring in NGC 6505 had remained undetected since the galaxy’s discovery in 1884, demonstrating Euclid’s capacity to reveal hidden cosmic phenomena in familiar regions of space.