Rarest NASA Photo Captures Einstein Ring And You Must See It

New Delhi: The ‘Einstein Ring,’ an extremely rare phenomenon, has been named NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month. This cosmic event happens when light from a very faraway galaxy bends around another massive galaxy in front of it. As you can see in the image, the bending creates a glowing spiral of lights, bright yellow at the center and orange at the outer edges, making it look like a glowing loop in space.

NASA shared the image in an X post, NASA wrote, "A perfect alignment, captured by @NASAWebb. This Einstein ring is formed from two galaxies: the closer, massive one at the center is warping the light from the more distant galaxy behind it.

What is an Einstein Ring?

In space, huge objects like galaxies have a strong gravitational pull. This pull can bend light, just like a glass lens bends light on Earth. When a distant galaxy’s light travels towards us but passes through a massive galaxy on the way, the light bends around it, forming a ring. This is called an Einstein Ring, named after scientist Albert Einstein, who predicted this effect in his Theory of Relativity.  

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For an Einstein Ring to appear, both the faraway galaxy and the one in front must be perfectly aligned. If the alignment is exact, we see a full ring; if slightly off, we see a broken or partial ring. These rings help astronomers study galaxies that are too far to be seen otherwise.  

What’s in This Einstein Ring?

In this image, the lensing galaxy (the one in the middle) is a bright elliptical galaxy, part of a galaxy cluster called SMACS J0028.2-7537. The distant lensed galaxy (the one whose light is bent into a ring) is a spiral galaxy. Even though the light is distorted, individual star clusters and gas clouds are clearly visible.