When NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope snapped a picture of an elliptical galaxy, it caught something else in the frame: A bright, red arc of light wrapped around it.
That glowing curve isn’t the sign of a broken telescope, but in fact another galaxy — about 19.5 billion light-years from Earth in space. It’s much farther than the elliptical galaxy, seen as the central dot in the image at the top of this story, roughly 2.7 billion light-years away.
The strange, bent shape of the extremely remote galaxy, called HerS 020941.1+001557, is caused by a quirk of nature called “gravitational lensing,” something predicted in Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity over a century ago. But the gravitational lensing here displays a special type of phenomenon, known as an Einstein ring.
Hubble spots a roaming black hole light-years from where it belongs
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