One of the most spectacular Einstein rings ever seen in space is enabling us to see what's happening in a galaxy almost at the dawn of time.
The smears of light called the Molten Ring, stretched out and warped by gravitational fields, are magnifications and duplications of a galaxy whose light has traveled a whopping 9.4 billion light-years. This magnification has given us a rare insight into the stellar 'baby boom' when the Universe was still in its infancy. //

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.
When combined with the Hubble Space Telescope, the resulting images are as detailed and sharp as observations taken with a telescope with a huge 48-meter aperture. From this, a team of researchers led by Anastasio Díaz-Sánchez of the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena in Spain worked out that light from the galaxy has traveled 9.4 billion light-years.