Experts Stunned After Witnessing Rare Phenomenon Known as the 'Einstein Ring' Captured by a Space Telescope

Countless cosmic phenomena occur throughout the vast spread of our observable universe. A team of astronomers came across one such phenomenon by happenstance when they retrieved some of the earliest data from the Euclid telescope, according to The European Space Agency (ESA). Euclid was launched in July 2023 to study the parts of the universe that scientists on Earth can't observe directly. The telescope sent some test images to Earth in the first few months after its launch.

The telescope's archive scientist, Bruno Altieri, observed what appeared to be an Einstein ring in those early images. The rarely observed rings were named after esteemed mathematician and physicist, Albert Einstein. "The rings are produced when two galaxies are almost perfectly aligned behind one another. Gravitational lensing occurs when the gravitational field from a massive object warps space and deflects light from a distant object behind it," said NASA's Hubble Site. In 2023, the Euclid telescope captured the image of a galaxy named NGC 6505, located approximately 590 million light-years from Earth.

Several telescopes have previously captured strange light and spatial phenomena but it was the first time a ring of light was revealed bending around a galaxy. The visible rings that were captured in the images were made of distorted lights from a previously undiscovered galaxy located 4.42 billion light-years away from NGC 6505. "I look at the data from Euclid as it comes in," Altieri said in a statement, per the ESA. "Even from that first observation, I could see it, but after Euclid made more observations of the area, we could see a perfect Einstein ring." The pictures were published in the scientific journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Experts studying the Einstein rings have hinted that this phenomenon could help them know more about dark energy which is a mysterious force that causes the universe to expand over time. "I find it very intriguing that this ring was observed within a well-known galaxy, which was first discovered in 1884," study coauthor Valeria Pettorino, ESA Euclid Project Scientist, in a statement. "The galaxy has been known to astronomers for a very long time." The discovery of the Einstein rings also proved the capacity of the Euclid telescope to capture images from unimaginable distances.

"It’s so rare that less than 1% of galaxies have an Einstein ring," Conor O’Riordan, a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, explained. "There are between 100 and 1,000 Einstein ring-like objects known, but only a few tens of them have been observed at the level of detail provided by the Euclid telescope. The background galaxy in this lens is almost perfectly aligned with the foreground galaxy which is very rare indeed." He also mentioned that the Einstein rings are the perfect example of strong gravitational lensing. "All strong lenses are special, because they're so rare, and they're incredibly useful scientifically. This one is particularly special because it’s so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful," O'Riordan concluded.