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This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a rare cosmic phenomenon called an Einstein ring. What at first appears to be a single, strangely shaped galaxy is actually two galaxies that are separated by a large distance. The closer foreground galaxy sits at the center of the image, while the more distant background galaxy appears to be wrapped around the closer galaxy, forming a ring.?? Einstein rings occur when light from a very distant object is bent (or ???lensed???) about a massive intermediate (or ???lensing???) object. This is possible because spacetime, the fabric of the Universe itself, is bent by mass, and therefore light travelling through space and time is bent as well. This effect is much too subtle to be observed on a local level, but it sometimes becomes clearly observable when dealing with curvatures of light on enormous, astronomical scales, such as when the light from one galaxy is bent around another galaxy or galaxy cluster. When the lensed object and the lensing object line up just so, the result is the distinctive Einstein ring shape, which appears as a full circle (as seen here) or a partial circle of light around the lensing object, depending on the precision of the alignment. Objects like these are the ideal laboratory in which to research galaxies too faint and distant to otherwise see. The lensing galaxy at the center of this Einstein ring is an elliptical galaxy, as can be seen from the galaxy???s bright core and smooth, featureless body. This galaxy belongs to a galaxy cluster named SMACSJ0028.2-7537. The lensed galaxy wrapped around the elliptical galaxy is a spiral galaxy. Even though its image has been warped as its light travelled around the galaxy in its path, individual star clusters and gas structures are clearly visible. The Webb data used in this image were taken as part of the Strong Lensing and Cluster Evolution (SLICE) survey (programme 5594), which is led by Guillaume Mahler at University of

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