The Molten Ring

 The Molten Ring. (Saurabh Jha/Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)

Gravitational lenses rule, particularly when one wants to see further than what existing tech can provide, something readily seen by the Molten Ring, an entity allowing us to view distant galaxies not even Hubble can see.

The phenomenon itself is called gravitational lensing, and while it has given us some absolutely amazing images, it also affords us brilliant opportunities to combine our own magnification capabilities – telescopes – with those of the Universe to see things that might otherwise be too far to make out clearly, or at all.

The Molten Ring (formally named GAL-CLUS-022058s) is just such an Einstein ring, magnified by the gravitational field around a huge cluster of galaxies in the constellation of Fornax. So powerful is this effect that not only does the distant galaxy appear in four distorted images, it's magnified by a factor of 20.

Illustration of gravitational lensing. (NASA, ESA & L. Calçada)