Molten ring in space allows Hubble to peer 9 billion years into the past - Digital Trends

Named for the physicist who predicted gravity’s strange stretching influence on space, studying rings like the one shown below can help astronomers peer out far into the distance, seeing a galaxy as it looked over 9 billion years ago.

The object might look like a ring, but the source of the light is actually a regular old galaxy.

The ring shape forms due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which the light from the distant galaxy is warped by the gravity of a galaxy cluster in between it and us.