Amateur astronomers know of a few sky sightings that require considerable expertise to view. One of the seven most challenging is called Einstein's Cross, requiring a relatively powerful telescope, a knowledge of exactly where to look, and considerable patience. For many scientists, it helps prove Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. For me, it symbolizes one of my great passions and helped me grow personally as an individual dedicated to the beauty of math and its power to transform my life.
An enlarged, long-exposure photograph of Einstein's Cross reveals a fuzzy central globe, surrounded by four slightly sharper globes, forming a small glowing cross glowing in the darkness of the northern sky. Actually, this is just two objects. One is a galaxy, a 14th magnitude system in the constellation of Pegasus. The second is a much stronger, brighter quasar. A quasar is an intense light source powered by a black hole, but we should not be able to see this one because it is much farther away from the earth and directly behind the quasar from our line of sight.
Einstein's most famous theory predicts why we can see that distant quasar, and why it looks like four nearly identical globes clustered around the central light of the foreground galaxy. His theory postulates that massive objects have the ability to curve space and that light follows these curves. The galaxy acts as a gravitational lens, bending the light from the quasar around it into four roughly equal images. Although it is very difficult to see, it is worth the effort, revealing not just a beautiful object but hard evidence for one of the most important theories of modern science.
In my senior year of high school, I developed a project for my school's math and science fair that analyzed the theoretical underpinnings of this astronomical phenomenon. My project was awarded a second-place ribbon. In my culture, women are supposed to be submissive an...