A group of International Astrophysicists has discovered an unusual object which is said to be ‘Einstein Ring’. It is one of the most symmetrical and rare astronomical phenomenon created by a galaxy located 10,000 million light years. Einstein ring is a distorted image of a very distant galaxy termed as “the source.” These Einstein rings are seen quite rare but are scientifically interesting.
Einstein Rings are predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Doctoral student Margherita Bettinelli from the Instituto de AstrofAsica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of La Laguna (ULL) along with the team discovered this rare phenomenon which is named as the “The Canarias Einstein ring”. This discovery was made while examining the data taken through the “Dark Energy Camera” (DECam) at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile.
The distortion is produced by the bending of the light rays from the source due to a massive galaxy, termed “the lens”. The strong gravitational field does not only attract objects which have a mass, but also bends the paths of light.
When the two galaxies exactly aligned with a separation on the sky of only 0.2 arc seconds, the image of the more distant galaxy is converted into a perfect circle which surrounds the lens galaxy. The irregularities in the circle are due to asymmetries in the source galaxy.
“We observe it as it was then: a blue galaxy which is beginning to evolve populated by young stars which are forming at a high rate. The lens galaxy is nearer to us, 6,000 million light-years away, and is more evolved. Its stars have almost stopped forming, and its population is old,” the authors said.
Researchers then began to observe and analyse its physical properties with the OSIRIS spectrograph on the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC). “Studying these phenomena gives us especially relevant information about the composition of the source galaxy, and also about the structure of the gravitational field and of the dark matter in the lens galaxy,” explained Antonio Aparicio, one of the astrophysicists.