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Environmental Policy Experts Can Master New Telescope Spots Rare 'Einstein Ring' Of Light Around Galaxy In Our Cosmic Neighborhood

Astronomers have spotted a rare Einstein ring using the new James Webb Space telescope, which shows how light bends around a massive galaxy cluster. The image is helping scientists better understand how galaxies evolve and form over time.

The discovery was made by a team of researchers led by Matthew Bayliss, an astronomer at The Ohio State University. He said in a statement that This is really just the beginning of what we can do with this amazing new telescope.

The ring appears as a nearly perfect circle around a galaxy cluster about 5 billion light-years from Earth. It was caused by the gravitational field of the massive grouping of galaxies, which bent and redirected the path of nearby light.

This phenomenon was predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity. But it has been difficult to observe directly until now because it requires both a very large galaxy cluster and a distant background object that just happens to align with the cluster along our line of sight.

This is the first time we've seen this effect with such a massive galaxy cluster, said Bayliss, who also works at The Ohio State University's Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics. And it's allowing us to study how galaxies form and evolve in unprecedented detail.

The team used Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to observe the ring. They say that other galaxy clusters may also produce similar Einstein rings, but they are much harder to spot without the powerful resolution of Webb's telescope.

The fact that we can see this at all is a testament to Webb's capabilities, said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who works on the James Webb Space Telescope mission. It's going to revolutionize our understanding of how galaxies grow and change over time.

The researchers noted that because galaxy clusters tend to be found near the center of galaxy formations, studying them can provide important clues about the universe's history.

We've known for a long time that massive galaxy clusters are key players in shaping the evolution of galaxies, said Brian Lemaux, an astronomer at The Ohio State University who is not involved with this study. But it wasn't until now that we had a tool like Webb that could give us such detailed information about how they do it.

The research is published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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