Two eyes are better than one

Get the most powerful telescopes in the world and point them at the same thing – what do you get? Well, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck telescopes on the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii have been looking at an object called SDSS J0737+3216.

You can’t actually see it directly as there’s a massive galaxy in the way but thanks to Mr Einstein, you can see it indirectly in the form of an Einstein ring. Massive objects, like stars and galaxies, bend light because of their gravity. When the object bending the light is really massive and the thing you want to see is directly behind it, as in this case, the light from the distant object gets bent into a telltale ring.

Astronomers have taken that joint image to piece together what the distant galaxy looks like and it turns out it’s very small and not too dissimilar to small galaxies in our own neighbourhood. The thing is, SDSS J0737+3216 is six billion light years away so this image shows it as it was six billion years ago.  They now reckon that this tiny galaxy could be what big spiral galaxies, like our Milky Way, are built from.

Albert would have been very proud.