Find Related products on Amazon

Shop on Amazon

Latest Webb telescope image shows a cosmic phenomenon called an 'Einstein ring'

Published on: 2025-09-22 11:59:12

This is what it looks like when light from one galaxy is bent around the mass of another. The latest image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, pictured above, also happens to be a stunning illustration of Einstein's theory of general relativity. So much so that the cosmic phenomenon is called an "Einstein ring." Einstein rings happen when light from one distant object is bent around the mass of another, slightly closer and even larger object. The effect is normally too subtle to observe up close on a local level, "but it sometimes becomes clearly observable when dealing with curvatures of light on enormous, astronomical scales," NASA writes. In the case of this image, when the light from one distant galaxy is warped around the mass of another. This "gravitational lensing," as it's technically called, is Einstein's general relativity in practice. Spacetime (the fusion of space and time that makes up the fabric of the universe) curving around an object's mass, with the curve itsel ... Read full article.