Einstein Rings

Reported April 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Mass (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Ever look at the stars and wonder how it all came to be? Astronomers are now proving how our universe was created.

Seventy years ago, Einstein predicted how his theory of relativity could be demonstrated in space. Today, astronomers are using the Hubble telescope to confirm Einstein's prediction and shed light on how the world formed.

It starts when we're children ... Looking high in the sky and wondering how this was all created. Adam Bolton and a team of astronomers are one step closer to unraveling the mystery, with the discovery of these eight new Einstein rings. "The Einstein Rings are a pair of galaxies -- one, say, 4-billion light years away or so, and another one, maybe twice as far," says Adam Bolton, Ph.D., an astronomer at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

In 1936, Albert Einstein wrote a paper using his theory of relativity, predicting the formation of the rings. Today, combining his information plus new data and photos from the Hubble telescope astronomers can find the rings. Bolton says, "What Hubble can do that telescopes on the ground cannot do is resolve very, very fine detail in images."

The phenomenon that created the rings is called gravitational lensing. The gravity of the nearer galaxy bends the path of light from the galaxy in the background, creating a dramatic bull's-eye. By studying the rings, astronomers precisely measure the mass of the closer galaxy.

"It teaches us more about the whole picture of the universe and, by extension, about how we fit into that," Bolton says.

Prior to this discovery only three other Einstein rings were visible. Astronomers believe they will discover even more.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Dolores Beasley/Erica Hupp
NASA Headquarters
Washington, DC
(202) 358-1753/1237

Donna Weaver
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, MD
(410) 338-4493
dweaver@stsci.edu
http://www.stsci.edu/

For more information on space science:

American Astronomical Society
2000 Florida Ave.,
NW Suite 400
Washington, DC 20009-1231
aas@aas.org
http://www.aas.org

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