Close-up of the Einstein ring around galaxy NGC 6505 (IMAGE)
Caption
A close-up view of the centre of the NGC 6505 galaxy, with the bright Einstein ring around its nucleus, captured by ESA’s Euclid space telescope.
The Einstein ring is formed by gravitational lensing, with the mass of galaxy NGC 6505 bending and magnifying the light from a more distant galaxy into a ring. NGC 6505 is a well-known galaxy only around 590 million light-years from Earth, and Euclid’s discovery of a spectacular Einstein ring here was unexpected.
Credit
ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, T. Li
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License
CC BY-SA