The miracle of birth, not of anything on Earth but of a galaxy, has been captured in photo images by the ALMA telescope. The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope snapped pictures of what looks like a glowing ring hailing from the most distant reaches of outer space. It’s actually a galaxy forming around a very old star.

The gravitational lensing of the ALMA telescope allowed it to capture an image of the effect of bending light from a distant source by an obscuring object’s gravity. This effect is the most suitable example of Einstein’s infamous theory of relativity, a turning point for modern physics. For this fact scientists dubbed the glowing ring of a baby universe an “Einstein Ring”.

The Hubble telescope, which orbits Earth in space, is known for the use of gravitational lensing to capture awe-inspiring images of the universe around us, but the ALMA telescope captured this breath-taking image of the Einstein ring, or galaxy SDP.81, from right here on Earth where it is located in the in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

ALMA has been considered the best and most powerful observatory standing on the planet since it recently started operating. Its recent capture of the “Einstein Ring” proves that ALMA has the ability to photograph objects in space in high resolution and very fine detail. The technology employed by ALMA allows it to view a galaxy within the earliest 15 percent of its actual, current age. The baby galaxy it captured most recently is estimated to be 12 million light years from Earth.