Five very old galaxies are now known to astrophysicists, thanks to Albert Einstein. A century ago, Einstein predicted an effect called cosmic gravitational lensing. Picture a massive galaxy out in space. From our vantage point, a second galaxy happens to be behind the first galaxy. That second galaxy should be hidden to us. Except that the nearer galaxy bends the light of the far galaxy coming our way. That light can sometimes become so distorted that it actually appears to ring the nearer galaxy. It’s called an Einstein ring, because he predicted that, too.

In the new study, researchers used the Herschel Space Observatory. The brightest spots on their sky map all turned out to be gravitationally magnified galaxies. The study is in the journal Science . [Mattia Negrello et al., " The Detection of a Population of Submillimeter-Bright, Strongly Lensed Galaxies "]

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Scientific American - Space