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 [--1--], a second galaxy happens to be behind the first galaxy. That second galaxy should be hidden to us. Except that the nearer galaxy [--2--] the light of the far galaxy coming our way. That light can sometimes become so [--3--] 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 [--4--] galaxies. The study is in the journal Science.
The observatory is really detecting infrared info, or heat, rather than visible light from the newly discovered galaxies. That radiation [--5--] when the universe was only two to four billion years old, less than a third of its current age.
Researchers expect to find hundreds of new, old galaxies this way, along with new info about the early universe.
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