Since the first James Webb Space Telescope images came out in July, our feeds have been awash with mind-boggling gorgeous space images – from crazy detailed images of Jupiter to the farthest known star.
Now, Webb did it again, this time picking up the perfect nearly perfect Einstein ring about 12 Billion Light year. And we can’t stop staring.
You can see the color image, which was shared by an astronomy graduate student Spaceguy44 on Reddit, below.
As Spaceguy44 explains on Reddit, an Einstein ring occurs when a distant galaxy is zoomed in and wrapped in an almost complete ring by a massive galaxy in front of it.
The galaxy in question is called SPT-S J041839-4751.8 and is a massive 12 billion light-years away.
Here’s a more distant look at it, also handled by Spaceguy44:
According to Spaceguy44, we would never have seen this galaxy without Einstein’s ring.
And the presence of Einstein’s rings, in addition to their beautiful appearance, allows us to study these galaxies, otherwise it is almost impossible to see galaxies.
This process is known as gravitational lensing, and it’s an effect predicted by Einstein – hence the name.
The effect only occurs when the distant galaxy, the closest magnifying galaxy and the observer (in this case the Webb Space Telescope) line up.
If you want to try it for yourself, Spaceguy44 says the stem and base of a wine glass create a similar effect. Try to do this with a book page and see the word enlarged.
Although Einstein’s episodes are rarely seen, this is almost unheard of. Hubble previously captured stunning images of Einstein’s rings.
This isn’t the first time Webb has captured an Einstein ring from SPT-S J041839-4751.8.
The Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured the same area in August, and Spaceguy44 has colorized and released it as well.
But the picture below was not clear.
In the most recent image, the data was captured by Webb’s Medium Infrared Instrumentation (MIRI) camera, and downloaded from the MAST portal file.
The image uses three different filters. Red is the F1000W filter, which captures wavelengths of light at 10 µm. Green is the F770W filter for 7.7 micron wavelengths. Blue is the F560W filter that captures 5.6 micron wavelengths.
The images were then aligned and colored with a Spaceguy44 asterisk, and further processing was performed in GIMP.