Latest Webb telescope image shows a cosmic phenomenon called an ‘Einstein ring’

The latest image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, pictured above, also happens to be a stunning illustration of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. So much so that the cosmic phenomenon is called an “Einstein ring.”

Einstein rings happen when light from one distant object is bent around the mass of another, slightly closer and even larger object. The effect is normally too subtle to observe up close on a local level, “but it sometimes becomes clearly observable when dealing with curvatures of light on enormous, astronomical scales,” NASA writes. In the case of this image, when the light from one distant galaxy is warped around the mass of another.

This “gravitational lensing,” as it’s technically called, is Einstein’s general relativity in practice. Spacetime (the fusion of space and time that makes up the fabric of the universe) curving around an object’s mass, with the curve itself being gravity. Objects like the ones pictured in the image — an elliptical galaxy wrapped in a spiral galaxy — are “the ideal laboratory in which to research galaxies too faint and distant to otherwise see.”

This Einstein ring was captured by the “Strong Lensing and Cluster Evolution (SLICE) survey” conducted at the University of Liège in Belgium. The survey is led by a team of astronomers looking “to trace eight billion years of galaxy cluster evolution,” according to NASA.