Our feeds have been inundated with breathtakingly beautiful images of space since the very first James Webb Space Telescope pictures were released in July, ranging from crazily detailed pictures of Jupiter to the farthest distant star known.
A nearly flawless Einstein ring that has traveled around 12 billion light-years to reach us has now been captured by Webb, proving that he is an expert at what he does. And we can not help but stare.
Below is a colorized version of the photograph that astronomy graduate student Spaceguy44 posted on Reddit.
An Einstein ring develops when a big galaxy in front of a distant galaxy magnifies it and wraps it into a nearly perfect ring, as Spaceguy44 explains on Reddit.
JWST Spots An Einstein Ring
The concerned galaxy is known as SPT-S J041839-4751.8. Without the Einstein ring, according to Spaceguy44, we would not be able to observe this galaxy at all.
Additionally, the existence of Einstein rings makes it possible to investigate these galaxies, which would otherwise be nearly hard to observe.
Einstein predicted this effect, hence the term gravitational lensing, which describes the process.
The alignment of the far-off galaxy, the nearby magnifying galaxy, and the observer (in this example, the Webb space telescope) is required for the effect to occur. Spaceguy44 claims that the stem and base of a wine glass produce a similar effect, so you may try it for yourself if you like. Try doing that with a book page to see the word magnified.
Even though seeing Einstein Rings is unusual, it does happen occasionally. Hubble has already taken pictures of stunning Einstein rings.Even again, this is not the first time Webb has managed to photograph SPT-S J0418394751.8.
The same region was photographed by the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) of the space telescope back in August, and Spaceguy44 colorized and released it at that time as well.
