The James-Webb telescope has captured a new pearl of the galaxy: an almost perfect Einstein ring. Explanations.
The light from this ring traveled about 12 billion light-years to reach the Terre. The photograph, which you can see above, was shared by the astronomy graduate student Spaceguy44 on Reddit.
And Einstein’s ring occurs when a distant galaxy is magnified and enveloped in a near-perfect ring by a massive galaxy in front of it. A process called gravitational lensing. Here the galaxy is called SPT-S J041839-4751.8. You can see it below.
In this image, the data was captured by the camera MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) of James-Webb and downloaded from portail MAST. It also 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 µm wavelengths; blue is the F560W filter which captures 5.6 µm wavelengths. The whole thing was then colorized by Spaceguy44 usingAstropyand an additional change has been made in GIMP.
