Mar 30 1998
From The Space Library
Astronomers at the University of Manchester in England and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) announced that six radio telescopes, in concert with the HST, had "captured the first image ever recorded of an unbroken `Einstein ring'," a "circle of light created by the gravitational warping of space between a very distant galaxy and the earth." Physicist Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity had predicted that "light from a distant object would travel a curving path if it passed close to a massive object along the line of sight from Earth." The radio image showed a fragmented group of bright arcs, but the HST showed that the galaxy's infrared emission region was perfectly in line with the gravitational lens and Earth, confirming the existence of the Einstein ring.
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