The ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) recently captured an Einstein Cross, with the four ‘petals’ that you see being a distant galaxy hidden behind the orange galaxy at the center. A galaxy at the center acts as a gravitational lens, bending the light emitted from the distant galaxy around it, enabling astronomers to detect the light from this hidden object.
This distant galaxy is observed as distorted and magnified. However, the special configuration of these two galaxies means that the hidden one appears as four images around the central ‘lens’ galaxy, forming a cross-like pattern called an Einstein Cross. Gravitational lensing – when a huge amount of matter distorts and magnifies the light – thus lets us discover hidden galaxies that would otherwise be invisible.
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The observations of this system were conducted with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at ESO’s VLT in Chile. MUSE splits the light coming from every point within the area being observed into a rainbow or spectrum, which provides astronomers with a wealth of information about the objects within the field of view,” said the ESO.
