A unique celestial light ring fascinates astronomers

The new image was captured by the WFC3 camera, which, since its installation in 2009, has greatly enhanced the observation capabilities of the Hubble Telescope.

Four points of light around two overlapping bright bodies (Hubble Telescope)

From time to time, the Hubble Telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the American Space Agency (NASA) can capture an exceptional picture of the deep universe, this time - on the ninth of this August - the researchers of this telescope released a new image of a ring of light that two galaxies share with Quasar Bright.

Shiny dots

After repairing a malfunction, a new life for the Hubble telescope may extend to the end of the decade For the first time, the Hubble telescope spots a planet changing its atmosphere Wild storms of Jupiter revealed by a new image of the Hubble telescope Water vapor discovered above Ganymede, one of Jupiter's largest moons.

In the picture, you can notice 4 points of light around two overlapping bright bodies. These two bodies are huge galaxies that are 4 billion light years away from Earth. This means that if you decide now to travel there at the speed of light (300 thousand kilometers per second) you will reach There after 4 billion years.

As for the Ring of Light and its four points, it is exceptional in that, as these points are repeated images of the same crime, a quasar called 2M1310-1714, discovered 3 years ago and since its discovery, and it is the focus of the attention of many astronomers.

Quasars are the nuclei of very distant galaxies with a very active core, and because of their extreme distance, we only see this active core from the galactic body. In 2019, for example, astronomers from NASA discovered a shining quasar with a capacity of 600 trillion suns.

Gravity lens

But to understand the reason for the recurrence of images of this quasar around galaxies, we can start from Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which says that light does not always travel in straight lines, but rather bends affected by the gravity of celestial bodies, and in 1919 the English astronomer Arthur Eddington was able to prove this.

Eddington photographed the position of a group of stars in the sky in two cases, the normal (night sky) and the total eclipse (while the sun is among these stars, but it is obscured by the moon and the stars can be observed). The results showed that the presence of the sun changed the positions of those stars, which means that the light of those stars reaching us on Earth is bent in the presence of the sun.

The same thing happens in the case of the quasar 2M1310-1714, as it is located for us on Earth in the background of the two galaxies, at a distance of more than 10 billion light years, and while the light rays coming from it pass around the two galaxies, they bend on their way to us, due to the gravity of the two galaxies, which causes this Ocular distortion.

This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing, because what gravity does to distort the light is similar to what glass lenses do, and this is not the first time that Hubble's lenses have captured such rings. LRG) is about 3 billion light-years away, elegantly circling another galaxy.

The galaxy "LRG" circles around another galaxy, the image was taken in 2011 (Hubble Telescope)

Hubble cameras

The new image was captured by the WFC3 camera, which, since its installation in 2009, has greatly enhanced the observation capabilities of the Hubble telescope, as it provides a wider field of view and a greater range of wavelengths, which means greater accuracy compared to other cameras in the same telescope.

Although its practical life was only 3 years, this camera is still able to impress scientists and the public alike, until now.