In July, we saw the first photos of James Webb, which we were all eagerly waiting for. Since then, a number of other impressive images have been released, including spiral galaxies and our solar system’s gas giant, Jupiter.
The most powerful observatory in the world continues to amaze us every day. Now he has observed a rare phenomenon called Einstein ring (ring). The image shows a bright sphere and a bright ring surrounding it. This is a galaxy about 12 billion light years away.
It’s known as SPT-S J041839-4751.8, and the reason we see it like this is due to gravitational lensing. At this time, the powerful gravity of a massive object or objects between the light source and the observer bends the rays, resulting in the effect predicted by Einstein.
This photo of Einstein’s rings was posted by Reddit user Spaceguy44, an astronomy student. According to him, such a phenomenon was caused by a massive galaxy between the James Webb Space Telescope and SPT-S J041839-4751.8. If it were not for him, we would not have seen this object, and now we have the opportunity to study it.
Although such phenomena are quite rare, they have not been observed by Hubble so far. SPT-S J041839-4751.8 itself has already been photographed by the web for the second time. The first time this happened was in August, when the observatory used the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), but the resulting image was much dimmer.
And the last image was taken by him through a mid-infrared camera (MIRI). It combines three filters: a red one that captures light at a wavelength of 10 micrometers, a green one that focuses on 7.7 micrometers, and a blue one that focuses on 5.6 micrometers.
Spaceguy44 downloaded this data from the MAST portal, matched the frames, colored it with the help of Astropy and processed it with GIMP.
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