Euclid Telescope’s Big Discovery: Einstein Ring
The Euclid Space Telescope, launched on July 1, 2023, is a project by ESA and NASA. Its mission is to study the dark universe, including dark matter and dark energy.
In September 2023, during early test images, Euclid detected a strange light pattern. Scientists later confirmed it as a perfect Einstein Ring.
An Einstein Ring happens when the light from a distant galaxy bends around a closer galaxy due to gravitational lensing. This effect was predicted by Einstein’s General Relativity theory in 1915.
The foreground galaxy, NGC 6505, is 590 million light-years away in the Draco constellation. The distant galaxy, whose light forms the ring, is 4.42 billion light-years away.
The research team named this discovery “Altieri’s Lens”, after Bruno Altieri, a Euclid archive expert.
Euclid will scan 14,000 square degrees of the sky, studying billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away. Scientists expect to find around 100,000 gravitational lenses, but only about 20 perfect Einstein Rings like this one.
This discovery proves Euclid’s power to reveal hidden cosmic secrets. Scientists hope it will help us understand the dark universe better in the coming years.
