An Einstein Ring is a very cool feature of gravitational lensing
where a background galaxy gets stretched out into a full ring
around the foreground lens.
The Molten Ring is a really interesting case where it's one of the largest galaxies
that forms a near complete Einstein ring,
The Molten Ring, you have a very large cluster of galaxies
that has magnified this background galaxy.
Einstein's theory of general relativity is really sort of what
predicted these Einstein rings in the first place.
He created this whole machinery for how gravity is supposed to work.
Matter would tell spacetime how to curve
and spacetime would tell matter how to move.
And then as you have light moving through this curved spacetime,
that those equations led to the prediction that this light would almost move on
what seems like curved paths and caused the phenomenon of gravitational lensing,
which is where this light gets essentially bent
and distorted by a foreground lens, like a galaxy cluster,
and creates these stretched out images that are magnified of these
distant galaxies that we see.
It's definitely a bit of an optical illusion.
So if you were to take the gravitational lens completely away,
then these background galaxies would just look like,
you know, the normal everyday galaxies that we see at these distances.
And it'd be a lot harder to to pick apart what's going on in
their inner workings.
So the gravitational lensing effect, it is kind of like
looking at a funhouse mirror and it makes the background object appear
a little bit bigger, a little bit distorted,
you know, just like you go to a funhouse and you see,
you know, your head looks gigantic, your body looks tiny.
It's a similar effect, but we can use it for science as opposed to just,
you know, looking at ourselves and saying, oh, wow, that's kind of funny.
The Hubble Space Telescope has definitely taken the clearest images
of the Einstein rings
and they've really, you know, verified this part of Einstein's theory of
general relativity.
They've really shown us a lot more about how gravitational lensing works
and really sort of push the limits of what we can learn
about these distant galaxies with gravitational lensing.