Load image object from internal url located in /assets

My “related pages”-plugin teasers a bunch of other pages. I want to show in this list

  • the page title
  • The first image from that page

In case the page does not contain an image i want to display a fallback image.
My image renderer receives image-objects (it resizes the image)
My default image is located here: assets/images/default.png

I can access my image this way:
$image = $kirby->url('assets') . '/images/default.png';

But as soon as i use $image in my image-renderer, it breaks (because $image contains only a string and not a whole image object).

How can i use the image-url to create/ call the whole image object?

See asset() | Kirby CMS

Thanks @texnixe , asset did the trick!