Today the scientific news of the day is that the European space telescope Euclid has identified the ring of Einstein, a halo of light around a “near” galaxy (cosmologically speaking), NGC 6505 (let’s call it Anna, the name of my ex, I always rename the difficult astronomical names and that tormented relationship seems to me to millions of years ago), just 590 million light years away.
Explan, indeed explains, for those who do not mean astronomy: the light, which travels at 300 thousand kilometers per second, takes 590 million years to travel the distance between the nearby galaxy in question and ours. But what is it Einstein’s ring? In reality nothing new from what he confirmed for the first time the relativitywhen Sir Arthur Eddington, on May 29, 1919, went on purpose on the island of Prince in Africa during a total eclipse of sun. If the relativity was right, the deformation of the space-time caused by the sun would have shown the stars that They should have been behind the sun, and so it was, verifying the greatest modern scientific theory after Darwin’s evolutionism.
In the case of the observation of Euclid the same thing happens: “the halo” around Anna is caused by the light of an even more distant galaxy, to 4.42 billion light years, due to the space-time deformed by Anna.
Very nice, and Euclid’s mission will continue, to try to reveal the mystery of the mysteries: dark matter and dark energy. Meanwhile, they have not yet said the name of the galaxy behind Anna, perhaps for privacy.