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You might think that the Einstein ring is the large fuzzy halo around the bright white elliptical galaxy nucleus in that wide-field Euclid image, but itโ€™s not.

The ring is small & tight around the nucleus. Itโ€™s hardly visible at all with the contrast in the main image, but easy once you play with the original data & extract it, as ESA did for this zoomed-in shot.

Except the Guardian photo editors didnโ€™t use it as no-one made it clear to them.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid/Euclid_discovers_a_stunning_Einstein_ring

#SpaceScience#Astronomy

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To be sure, this is a cool discovery, especially as the ring is so perfect & it was found in a well-known galaxy. Conor Oโ€™Riordanโ€™s paper below.

That said, itโ€™s slightly misleading in another sense. This is an example of *strong* gravitational lensing, while Euclidโ€™s main focus is on *weak* lensing, where the gravity of large accumulations of dark matter subtly tweaks the orientations of galaxies.

You only โ€˜seeโ€™ it when you measure large statistical samples of them.

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/02/aa53014-24/aa53014-24.html