Double Einstein Ring Discovered

Einstein's Theory of Relativity revealed a series of strange spatial and temporal effects. The Einstein ring is only one of many. Recently, the famous Hubble Space Telescope was able to detect a double ring pattern, resembling a bull's eye-like optical effect, determined by the presence of a complex light bending structure, which could provide new insight dark matter, dark energy and the structure of galaxies in the early universe.

As you may already suspect, the Einstein ring pattern is obtained though a gravitational lensing effect. Meaning that the light coming from background structures, stars, galaxies, is being bent as it travels through the vicinity of a massive structure, such as a galaxy or a black hole. This amplifies the light and shapes the image of the background structure into a circle, thus the name Einstein ring.

The ring's characteristics have been detailed by astronomers Raphael Gavazzi and Tommaso Treu, from the University of California, at the American Astronomical Society. Since they were predicted, due to the Theory of Relativity, multiple such gravitational lensing effects have been detected; however, precise circular Einstein rings are somehow extremely rare and require a perfect alignment between the light emitting structure, the gravitational lens and the observer.

The newly discovered ring presents an additional feature, in the fact that of a double ring. According to Tommaso, the chance of finding such rare features in a gravitational lensing effect is somewhere in 1 in 10,000 observed rings, odds comparable to that of winning two consecutive roulette games, with the same played number.

The light-emitting galaxies in the background seem to be almost perfectly aligned with the gravitational lens and the Earth. The galaxy providing the required gravitational field to create the lensing effect is situated at about 3 billion light years away from Earth, while the galaxies in the background lie at about 6 respectively 11 billion light years away.

It seems that the unique light bending effects can be used to determine the structure of the body that is creating the curvature of space in the respective area. Astronomers identified it as a dwarf galaxy, with a central mass density of about 1 billion solar masses, which presents evidence of dark matter similar to that seen in other spiral galaxies.

Astronomers argue that with a larger sample of such double Einstein ring, they could be able to determine the exact content in dark matter, in the mass of the universe. They estimated that about 50 of these gravitational lensing effects would be just enough and could possibly reveal accurate measurements, with a precision of 10 percent.