NASA stumbles across 'faraway galaxy' that 'could uncover more secrets of the universe'
NASA has made the "surprising but amazing" discovery of a "faraway galaxy" never seen before.
Amid the raft of findings NASA has uncovered in the last year - from an asteroid ploughing towards Earth to a "ghost island" in the Caspian sea - this latest one has elicited high praise and excitement from astronomers.
Experts tracking the Euclid spacecraft have stumbled upon a phenomenon called an Einstein ring. An Einstein ring is light from a distant galaxy "which bends to form a ring that appears aligned with a foreground object".
READ MORE: Paloma Faith caught having sex in public as singer admits she 'made eye contact' with stranger
READ MORE: Exact temperature to keep your home as engineer shares best thermostat setting for February
The name honours Albert Einstein, whose general theory of relativity predicts that light will bend and brighten around objects in space.
Scientist Bruno Altieri noticed the ring among images from the spacecraft’s early testing phase in September 2023.
“Even from that first observation, I could see it, but after we made more observations of the area, we could it [the ring] perfectly,” Altieri said. “That was amazing.”
Valeria Pettorino, ESA Euclid project scientist, finds it "very intriguing that the ring was observed within a well-known galaxy, which was first discovered in 1884" yet "has never been observed before".
"The galaxy has been known to astronomers for a very long time," she stressed.
The ring appears to circle round the centre of a well-studied elliptical galaxy called NGC 6505, which is around 590 million light-years from Earth.
That may sound far, but on the scale of the entire universe, NGC 6505 is close by. Incredibly, this is the first time that the ring of light surrounding the galaxy has been detected.
What's more, this faraway galaxy has never been seen before, so much so that it doesn't even have a name.
“An Einstein ring is an example of strong gravitational lensing,” explained Conor O’Riordan, lead author of the paper analysing the ring. All strong lenses are special, because they’re so rare, and they’re incredibly useful scientifically.
"This one is particularly special, because it’s so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful.”
Einstein rings are a rich base for scientists to explore many mysteries of the universe, like dark energy, which is the mysterious force that appears to cause the universe’s expansion.
In general, the fact that the Einstein ring was found so early in NASA's mission suggests experts are on course to uncover many more secrets of the universe.
