A doctoral student at Spain’s Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute, or IAC, has found a rare phenomena in the Universe – an Einstein ring caused when the force of gravity is so powerful that it distorts light, as predicted by the Theory of Relativity.
Margherita Bettinelli located the ring by chance while inspecting data from the Dark Energy Camera, or DECam, in the four-meter (13-foot) White Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile.
Bettinelli encountered the ring as she surveyed the population of stars in the dwarf Sculptor galaxy, which is the focus of her doctoral dissertation, the IAC said in a statement.
The discovery immediately caught the attention of the IAC’s Star Population team, which probed the ring’s physical properties with the Osiris Large Telescope in the Canary Islands.
An Einstein ring happens when the image of a distant galaxy is distorted by the gravity from a massive galaxy, called the “lens,” located between the source of light and the observer.
When the two galaxies are aligned from the point of view of the observer, the image of the more distant galaxy becomes an almost perfect circle.
In Bettinelli’s discovery, now called the “Canarias Einstein Ring,” the source galaxy is located roughly 10 billion light years from Earth.
As a result of the expanding Universe, light reaches Earth in some 8.5 billion years and the galaxy can be seen as it was back then – a blue cluster in the early stages of evolution, filled with rapidly forming young stars.
The “lens” galaxy, with a mass comparable to the Milky Way’s, is located about 6 billion light years from Earth and is in a more advanced stage of evolution, populated with old stars.
