Also known as gravitational lenses, these rings divert and distort the light from background galaxies. It forces light to"to travel along many different light paths toward Earth, making it seem as though the galaxy is in several places at once," NASA said in a statement. The lightforms acircle around the galaxy cluster andis a visual indicator of the huge masses that are bending time and space in that region. Astronomers take advantage of gravitational lenses when they are trying to look at faraway objects, Howell explains. The rings magnify objects that otherwise are too distant to see in today's telescopes.
In 2015, this method of observation allowed astronomers to find star-forming regions in a galaxy formed just 2.4 billion years after the Big Bang. In 2016, scientists discovered another Einstein ring in a star group within the Sculptor dwarf galaxy. Scientific teams planto use the Sculptor dwarf galaxy ring to observe the nature of dark matter.
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