Molten ring in space allows Hubble to peer 9 billion years into the past

By Georgina Torbet Published April 28, 2022

Gravity warps space in strange and counter-intuitive ways, and the bigger the source of gravity, the bigger the warping. One example of gravity’s optical illusions is beautiful rings in space named Einstein rings, one of which was recently captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Named for the physicist who predicted gravity’s strange stretching influence on space, studying rings like the one shown below can help astronomers peer out far into the distance, seeing a galaxy as it looked over 9 billion years ago.

Image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, depicts GAL-CLUS-022058s, located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Fornax (The Furnace). — The narrow galaxy elegantly curving around its spherical companion in this image is a fantastic example of a truly strange and very rare phenomenon. This image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, depicts GAL-CLUS-022058s, located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Fornax (The Furnace). GAL-CLUS-022058s is the largest and one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered in our Universe. ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Jha; Acknowledgement: L. Shatz

The object might look like a ring, but the source of the light is actually a regular old galaxy. The ring shape forms due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which the light from the distant galaxy is warped by the gravity of a galaxy cluster in between it and us.

Recommended Videos

Not only does this phenomenon change the apparent shape of the galaxy, but it also magnifies and brightens it. The galaxy appears 20 times brighter due to the lensing effect, which allowed Hubble to image it with the equivalent of an enormous 48-meter-aperture telescope.

This particular ring is formally known as GAL-CLUS-022058s, but it has a more colloquial nickname as well: The Molten Ring, which is appropriately located in the constellation of Fornax (the Furnace). This image was shared as a Hubble picture of the week in December last year, and since then researchers have been studying the ring using other tools as well like the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) FORS instrument.

By looking at this ring, researchers can learn about a very distant galaxy, effectively looking back in time to when the universe was less than half of its current age. This period was a busy, active one in which many stars were being born.

“The lensed galaxy is one of the brightest galaxies in the millimeter wavelength regime,” said one of the authors, Helmut Dannerbauer of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands in Spain. “Our research has also shown that it is a normal star-forming galaxy (a so-called main sequence galaxy) at the peak epoch of star formation in the Universe.”

Georgina Torbet

Former Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

Topics

Space

Want a city on the Moon? Scientists say there’s not enough water

A billion tons still comes up short

Artist impression of activities in a Moon Base.

For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.

A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.

Space

NASA’s new telescope can see 100 times more sky than Hubble in a single shot

NASA just launched a $4 billion telescope to map billions of galaxies

NASA Roman Telescope Launch Featured

The Hubble telescope has an almost legendary status. Over the last three decades, Hubble gave us some of the most spectacular close-ups of the universe ever captured, and now, NASA’s newest space telescope wants to see the bigger picture. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30. Roman is now beginning a roughly three-month journey toward the Sun-Earth L2 point, nearly a million miles away, where it will spend its primary five-year mission surveying huge portions of the cosmos.

Roman carries a 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same diameter as Hubble’s, but its Wide Field Instrument can capture a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s. NASA expects it to use that combination of sharpness and scale to map billions of galaxies, study dark matter and dark energy, and discover enormous numbers of previously unknown worlds.

Space

NASA built the Roman Space Telescope to study dark matter, but it can also help protect Earth from killer asteroids

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope wasn't built to hunt asteroids, but it turns out to be great at it.

Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.

NASA is about to launch a telescope built to unlock some of the universe's biggest mysteries, and it turns out that same design could help protect Earth along the way.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch from Kennedy Space Center on August 30, 2026, with a primary mission focused on studying dark matter and dark energy - the invisible forces shaping galaxies and cosmic expansion. Researchers now say its unique design also makes it unexpectedly effective at spotting dangerous asteroids headed our way (via MIT Technology Review).