Rare ‘Einstein ring’ spotted in Euclid telescope’s test images

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. This discovery is very encouraging for the future of the Euclid mission and demonstrates its fantastic capabilities.” Decoding a rare Einstein ring American astronomer Lewis Swift first observed the galaxy NGC 6505 in 1884, and it resembled a bright yellowish blob, with the detail of the ring obscured by the atmosphere, said lead study author Conor O’Riordan, a postdoctoral scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. “By observing from space with Euclid, where there is no atmosphere to blur things out,” O’Riordan said in an email, “we are able to observe in great detail and reveal things like this which were hiding in plain sight.” Einstein rings are examples of strong gravitational lensing, O’Riordan said, a phenomenon that acts like a magnifying glass in the universe, revealing celestial objects and light from distant galaxies that would otherwise remain unseen. This galaxy in the foreground acts like a ‘lens,’ focusing the light from the background galaxy into a distorted but highly magnified ring-shaped image of the background galaxy.” A close-up view of the center of the NGC 6505 galaxy showcases the bright Einstein ring surrounding it. It is only when we account for the missing dark matter that we can predict the size of the ring that we actually observe.” Gravitational lenses like the newly detected Einstein ring can help shed light on what’s going on in the inner regions of galaxies, said Justin Spilker, an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M University.