Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

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

By

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.

Related

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.”

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Hubble Space Telescope captures the earliest stage of star formation
A small, dense cloud of gas and dust called CB 130-3 blots out the center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. CB 130-3 is an object known as a dense core, a compact agglomeration of gas and dust. This particular dense core is in the constellation Serpens and seems to billow across a field of background stars.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a beautiful cloud of dust and gas located in the constellation of Serpens. This cloud is a type of object called a dense core, with enough densely packed material that it could one day be the birthplace of a new star.

The object, called CB 130-3, makes an interesting companion to the protostar image recently shared from the James Webb Space Telescope. This Hubble image shows the earliest phase of star formation, in which dust and gas come together to form a core, while the Webb image shows the next phase of development in which the core is dense enough to attract more material via gravity and starts rotating and giving off jets.

Read more
Hubble captures rare image of a supernova as it happens
As a result of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, three different moments in a far-off supernova explosion were captured in a single snapshot by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The light from the supernova, which was located behind the galaxy cluster Abell 370, was multiply lensed by the cluster’s immense gravity. This light took three different paths through the cosmic lens of the massive cluster. The three paths were three different lengths, so when the light arrived at Hubble (on the same day in December 2010), the supernova appeared at three different stages of evolution.

When a massive star runs out of fuel and approaches the end of its life, it explodes in a huge outpouring of energy called a supernova. These events can be so bright that they outshine entire galaxies, but they don't last for long -- just the blink of an eye, in cosmic terms. It's hard to capture the sudden brightness and fast dimming of a supernova event, because they are difficult to predict, but the Hubble Space Telescope recently managed to capture three different moments of a supernova in a single image.

"It is quite rare that a supernova can be detected at a very early stage, because that stage is really short," said Wenlei Chen, an author of the paper, in a statement. "It only lasts for hours to a few days, and it can be easily missed even for a nearby detection. In the same exposure, we are able to see a sequence of the images—like multiple faces of a supernova."

Read more
Spooky cobwebbed Hubble image helps investigate dark matter
Hundreds of small galaxies appear across this view. Their colours vary. Some are shades of orange, while others are white. Most appear as fuzzy ovals, but a few have distinct spiral arms. There are also many thin, long, orange arcs that curve around the centre of the image, where there is a prominent orange glow.

With Halloween coming up tomorrow, the Hubble Space Telescope team is celebrating by releasing a new Hubble image showing the dark cobwebs of galaxy cluster Abell 611. Located an incredible 3.2 billion light-years away, this view shows hundreds of galaxies that are bound together by gravity into one enormous structure.

Taken using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 instruments, the image combines both visible light and infrared observations.

Read more