By Ron Cowen
From Austin, Texas, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/7413.jpg?resize=300%2C242&ssl=1)
Astronomers have for the first time spied an extremely rare, double cosmic mirage.
As first predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a massive foreground galaxy acts like a lens, bending or distorting the light from a galaxy that lies farther away. In most cases, the light is bent into an arc. But in rare instances, when the background galaxy is exactly aligned with the foreground galaxy as observed from Earth, the light is distorted into a perfect circle known as an Einstein ring. About 50 such rings have been detected.