Sempiternal space surrounds our earth supplying us a serendipitous view of sights
equally stunning splendiferous and spitefully speculative
these superfluous scores of space subsistence come in all shapes and sizes
but can be the splendor of a certain stunner that it will make you describe it only in poetry behold
the cosmic beauty that is called an Einstein ring welcome the Factnomenal and today let's
discuss the wonderful rings of fire in deep space that are rare and equally mesmerizing
the universe often surprises us with naturally occurring phenomena
that may put our highly imaginative fantasies to shame the Einstein ring is one such occurrence
that makes space so beautiful and intriguing a perfect ring of fire in the deep dark sky
and though such cosmic oddity may deceive you with its supernatural glamour like every other thing in
our universe there is well-defined science behind their existence in fact we theorized
the existence of Einstein rings long before we actually found one out there the Einstein ring
is created when the light that comes from distant objects such as galaxies stars nebulas etc passes
an extremely large mass like a galaxy cluster the light from a background galaxy is diverted and
distorted around the massive intervening cluster and forced to travel along many different light
paths toward earth making it seem as though the galaxy is in several different places at once
and if you were wondering why Einstein got the dibs on the name of this real life Eye of Sauron
it's because he was the one who theorized their existence Einstein predicted the bending of
light by a gravitational body in 1912 a few years before his publication of general relativity in
1916. back in that time we didn't have telescopes powerful enough to detect signs of this phenomenon
the ring effect however was first mentioned in the academic literature by Oreste Volsen
in a short article in 1924 in which he mentioned the halo effect of gravitation when the source
lens and observer are in near perfect alignment however the effect was confirmed by the British
astronomer Arthur Eddington in 1919 during a solar eclipse on the island of principe off the
west coast of Africa noting that stars near the eclipse disc appeared fractionally out of place
because their light was being bent by the sun's gravity Einstein remarked upon this effect in 1936
he theorized that the fabric of space-time was not rigid but flexible like the surface
of a trampoline a massive object in this case a foreground galaxy can bend space the way a bowling
ball bends the fabric of the trampoline that bend causes any light from background objects to curve
around the foreground object instead of traveling in a straight line and if the two objects are
perfectly lined up the background galaxy will appear as a circle surrounding the foreground
or lens galaxy forming the einstein ring in one of the most recent discoveries by the
hubble telescope nasa has come across a remote galaxy that is greatly magnified and distorted
by the effects of gravitationally warped space in 2018. located nearly 9.4 billion
light years away from us this galaxy is an example of one of the largest nearly complete
einstein rings ever seen located at the peak epic of star formation in cosmic evolution the
stars were born in the concerned galaxy at a rate of a thousand times faster than within our own
such speedy star formation has caused the galaxy's light to be magnified by a factor of 20.
thanks to this boost by mother nature hubble was able to capture the lensing effect as it also
created multiple apparitions around the curved arc of the single background magnified galaxy
by now we have come across hundreds of gravitational lenses in our space
exploration about half a dozen of them are partial einstein rings with diameters up to an arc second
although either the mass distribution of the lenses is not perfectly axially symmetrical
or the source lens and observer are not perfectly aligned this is why finding a
perfect einstein ring is such a big deal in order to derive the physical properties of the galaxy
astronomers had to precisely model the effects of the lensing on the galaxy's image such a model
could only be obtained with hubble imaging only hubble helped to identify the four duplicated
images and the stellar clumps of the lens galaxy the ring was codenamed gal kloss022058s
and is located in the southern hemisphere constellation of fornax known as the furnace
that and the clumped appearance of the ring is why perhaps they appropriately named it
the molten ring last year hubble was able to capture yet another perfect einstein ring
about 3.4 billion light years from earth forming a visible ring the round object at the center of the
photograph released by the esa or european space agency is actually three galaxies that appear as
seven the image is a combination of four separate images of the most distant galaxies forming the
ring around the others the farthest galaxy is a special type of very bright galaxy with a gigantic
black hole at its center known as a quasar given that this galaxy is billions of light years from
us it should be invisible to even the best of telescopes but its light is curved by the two
galaxies in front which are about 3 billion light years away the light from the galaxy split in
multiple direction making its image form in five separate places four times on the ring and once
at the center of the ring sadly it can only be detected only in the telescope's numerical data
such formation is often considered an einstein cross a variant of the einstein ring and is quite
commonly found among most of the discovered einstein rings while gravitationally lensed
light sources are often shaped into an einstein ring due to the elongated shape of the lensing
galaxy and the quasar being off center the images form a peculiar cross shape instead
recent observations by nasa's chandra x-ray observatory have been used to measure the size
of the magnified x-ray emitting region surrounding the distant black hole estimated to contain the
mass of 500 million suns using a technique called microlensing which uses individual stars in the
intervening galaxy to increase magnification a team of researchers has determined that the
black hole responsible for einstein's cross is spinning incredibly mind-blowingly fast
over 70 percent of the speed of light that's about 470 million miles per hour these findings indicate
that over billions of years of accumulating material into rapidly spinning multi-million
degree disks especially when aligned with their own rotation supermassive black holes like the
one in Einstein's Cross can keep accelerating until they achieve near relativistic velocities
there are two necessary requirements for the observability of Einstein rings.
The mass distribution of the lens needs to be approximately axially symmetric as seen from the
observer and the source must lie exactly on top of the resulting degenerate point like caustic
such a geometric arrangement is highly unlikely for point-like sources
but astrophysical sources in the real universe have a finite extent and it is enough if a
part of the source covers the point caustic in order to produce such an annular image
that was a little heavy wasn't it but we wish there was a similar way to explain this
however finding these Einstein rings is important because they not only help to increase our reach
in space but they also work as a mirror to the past as the light that passes around
them is not new it's primordial by the time it arrives in our telescopes the first Einstein
ring was discovered in 1988 a quasar lensed by a nearer galaxy into two but very similar images
of the same object the images were stretched around the lens into an almost complete ring
it took us another decade to find our first complete Einstein ring the galaxy causing the
lens here is an ancient elliptical galaxy and the image we were able to see through the lens is a
dark dwarf satellite galaxy which we would not be able to see even with the current technology
Einstein rings help us to understand deep space better than our capabilities they reveal more
information about the distribution of dark matter dark energy the nature of distant galaxies and the
curvature of the universe this is why molten ring is such an impactful discovery because we observed
multiple rings around it the odds of finding a double ring around a massive galaxy are one in
ten thousand that makes molten rings such a rare find it's like discovering a golden needle in an
infinite haystack if we managed to find more multiple ranged Einstein rings the astronomers
would be able to measure the dark matter content of the universe and the equation of state of the
dark energy to within 10 precision getting us one step closer to understanding the universe better
tell us in the comments what secrets you think we might uncover from these primordial galaxies
far beyond our ever possible reach and as always thanks for watching Factnomenal