The European Space Agency has released a new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. It depicts an object that resembles a precious ring in shape and appearance.
The image was obtained using a Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) camera. The instrument is designed to study dark matter, a form of matter invisible to the naked eye that researchers believe makes up most of the mass in the universe.
As part of the project, the Webb telescope is observing quasars. One of them is captured in the photograph. It is known as RX J1131-1231. The quasar is located about six billion light years from Earth, in the constellation of the Chalice.
“It is considered one of the best lensed quasars discovered to date because the foreground galaxy blurs the image of the background quasar into a bright arc and produces four images of the object,” the researchers wrote.
In the photo, the quasar looks like a bright, blurry ring or a ring that glows in different colors. Gravitational lenses were first predicted by the famous theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. It is known that all matter in the Universe bends the space around it and the greater the mass of the object, the stronger the effect.
“Around very massive objects, such as galaxies, light follows a curved space that appears to deviate from its original path by a clearly visible amount,” the astronomers explain. “One consequence of gravitational lensing is that it can magnify distant astronomical objects, allowing objects to be seen and studied that would otherwise be too dim or distant.”
