A beautiful, “ornate” halo of warped light created by a supermassive black hole takes center stage in one of the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The bright loop, which is remarkably similar to a “Einstein’s ring“, is adorned by four bright spots – but not all of them are real.
Starry halo in new image it is composed of the light of a quasar – a supermassive black hole at the heart of a young galaxy that ejects powerful jets of energy as it swallows vast amounts of matter. According to European Space Agency (ESA).
The circular shape of the quasar is the result of ia phenomenon known as gravitational lensingin which light from a distant object—such as a galaxy, quasar, or supernova—travels through spacetime that is curved by gravity of another massive object that is between the distant object and the observer. As a result, the light appears to bend around the middle object even though it is traveling in a straight line. In this case, the quasar is being viewed by a nearby unnamed galaxy, which is visible as a blue dot in the center of the bright ring.
Gravitational lensing also magnifies our view of extremely distant objects such as RX J1131-1231, which will otherwise be almost invisible to us. This zoom effect can create bright spots on lensed objects, which shine like brilliant gems in a jewelespecially when the distant object is not perfectly aligned with the observer.
This photo has four bright spots, suggesting that four different objects are being lensed. However, the orientation and appearance of these jewels around the ring tell us that they are mirror images of a single bright spot, which has been duplicated by the lensing effect, according to the ESA.
Doubling the bright spot is especially common with warped quasars because these objects are some of the brightest entities in the universe.
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When light from a distant gravitationally lensed object forms a perfect circle, it is known as an Einstein ring, so named because Albert Einstein first predicted the lens effect with his the theory of general relativity in 1915.
However, in this case, the light is not perfectly lensed and the ring shape is mainly due to the doubling of the quasar’s bright spot. Previous images of the warped quasar also show that the light does not form a perfect circle.
The Einstein rings and other gravitationally lensed objects can help reveal hidden information about distant objects. For example, in 2014, researchers used light from RX J1131-1231 to determine how fast its supermassive black hole was spinning, sister site Live Science. Space.com previously reported.
The size and shape of gravitationally lensed objects also allow scientists to calculate the mass of their lensed galaxies, like the blue dots in this image. By comparing this value to the light emitted by the galaxy, researchers can calculate how much dark matter – a mysterious type of matter that does not react with light but interacts gravitationally with normal matter – lies within these galaxies. As a result, these warped light shows could be ours the best tool to discover the secret identity of dark matter.