The image above looks like something out of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy, but there are a few key differences.

One, it is real, not a CGI representative of the Eye of Sauron, the Dark Lord. Two, it doesn’t have an elliptical pupil.

But it does have a “ring” connection. It is an example of what astronomers call an Einstein ring, a phenomenon that occurs (observationally speaking) when light from a distant source (in this case, a galaxy called SDP.81) is distorted by the gravity of something else with an enormous amount of mass (like a black hole or another galaxy) that is in a direct line between the source and the viewer.

SDP.81 is, indeed, a galaxy far, far away: about 12 billion light years. So, looking at this galaxy is like looking at the universe “shortly” after its birth.

The distortion caused by the gravity of the galaxy that lies between us and SDP.81 creates a kind of cosmic “lens”, which bends the distant light into a ring, an effect called gravitational lensing (predicted by Albert Einstein’s original theory of general relativity, thus bearing his name).

This image comes to us courtesy of ALMA, an observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile that consists of an array of 73 enormous radio telescopes run by an international partnership. This makes it the largest observatory in the world.

The latest info on SDP.81 comes courtesy of a team of astronomers led by Catherine Vlahakis (with new research to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters).

It must have been a sight to behold when the image was first created. Especially if that first viewer was a LOTR nerd.