By Free Republic | Created at 2024-09-30 02:41:16 | Updated at 2024-09-30 05:24:53
4 hours ago
"Most Exquisitely Aligned" Gravitational Lens Is A One-In-A-Billion Find...The object is record-breaking and it has implications well beyond its beauty.
IFL Science ^ | September 19, 2024 | Dr. Alfredo Carpineti
Posted on 09/29/2024 6:19:03 PM PDT by Red Badger
Hubble views of the Carousel Lens. Image credit: William Sheu/UCLA
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Astronomers have found an incredible gravitational lens. Thanks to a chance alignment, a foreground cluster of galaxies has magnified the light of not one, but seven background galaxies, creating a gravitational lens that has been described as “most exquisitely aligned”. It has been dubbed the Carousel Lens.
Gravitational lenses are created by the gravity of massive objects, usually galaxies or clusters of galaxies. Their density is such that they warp spacetime, creating a lens that can magnify and change the shape of distant objects. In this case, there are four massive galaxies in the foreground that act as a lens, three of them close to each other. They are located about 5 billion light-years from us.
The seven background galaxies are spread out far across the universe, the closest being 7 billion light-years away and the furthest 12 billion light-years away. It was simply chance that placed the lens and those seven galaxies in a single line of sight from our vantage point.
Galaxy number four is particularly interesting. Its location behind the lens is such that it creates an Einstein cross. Four images are clearly visible 90 degrees from each other (with a secret fifth in the middle too dim to see). This is the largest Einstein cross ever seen and it tells us that the distribution of mass in the lens is quite symmetrical.
“This is literally a one-in-a-billion object in the sky. The images that we used for this search contained a billion astrophysical objects, mostly galaxies, and this was a rare alignment of galaxies that we found in those data,” co-author Dr David Schlegel, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division, told IFLScience.
The four main galaxies in the lensing cluster are marked with an L, and the images of the different lensed galaxies are marked 1-7 and letters a to d. Image credit: William Sheu (UCLA) using Hubble Space Telescope data
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The discovery is part of observations conducted in the context of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys. The team stresses that all the images are publicly available and anyone can see them online. But good luck finding a more striking representative of strong gravitational lenses than the Carousel.
“About 2,000 strong lenses have been found in this set of imaging data, from our team and competing teams. This is visually the most striking, and arguably the most interesting for continued study,” Dr Schlegel explained.
Gravitational lenses are not just pretty – they are also pretty useful. Their formation is predicated on the distribution of dark matter around the galaxies of the lens, a way for astronomers to infer where the invisible dark matter might be. Understanding dark matter and dark energy is critical to discovering if they do indeed exist and exactly what they are.
“Our excitement with this particular object is precisely because it can be used for cosmological studies. What makes a gravitational lens most useful for cosmology is to have multiple lensed galaxies and a simple, symmetric distribution of mass. This satisfies those conditions and then some – lensing seven background galaxies is a record. It’ll be interesting to see if that record is ever broken,” Dr Schlegel told IFLScience.
The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal.
TOPICS: Arts/Photography; Astronomy; History; Science
KEYWORDS: astronomy; carousellens; gravitationallens; gravitationallensing; science
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1 posted on 09/29/2024 6:19:03 PM PDT by Red Badger
To: MtnClimber; SunkenCiv; mowowie; SuperLuminal; Cottonbay
2 posted on 09/29/2024 6:19:50 PM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegals are put up in 5 Star hotels....................)
To: Red Badger
Don’t know what to say other than “cool.”
3 posted on 09/29/2024 6:33:39 PM PDT by Red6
To: Red Badger
Looks like HAL the computer from “2001”. So that’s where he ended up...
4 posted on 09/29/2024 6:47:15 PM PDT by Jim W N (MAGA by restoring the Gospel of the Grace of Christ (Jude 3) and our Free Constitutional Republic!)
To: Red Badger
Looks like HAL the computer from “2001”. So that’s where he ended up...
5 posted on 09/29/2024 6:47:21 PM PDT by Jim W N (MAGA by restoring the Gospel of the Grace of Christ (Jude 3) and our Free Constitutional Republic!)
To: Red Badger
Why isn’t there a single white object?
6 posted on 09/29/2024 6:48:50 PM PDT by cymbeline
To: Red Badger
Red; Thanks for posting! Incredible picture!
Don't think its answerable, but is or can anyone/any being look our direction on the other side of the lens? Not thinking so. Absent some incredible advance in space travel, we are quarantined by the incomprehensible distances and our lifespans.
To: cymbeline
If you research it (I am not going to) it is probably a false color image.
To: cymbeline
If you were to see the objects without the lens you would just see a small fuzzy dot if you could see anything at all................
9 posted on 09/29/2024 6:52:59 PM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegals are put up in 5 Star hotels....................)
To: Pete from Shawnee Mission
I would imagine the lens works both ways..................
10 posted on 09/29/2024 6:55:23 PM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegals are put up in 5 Star hotels....................)
To: Red Badger
:^) Hubble data. That thing has been a bargain.
11 posted on 09/29/2024 6:59:00 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
To: Red Badger
Objects in your mirror are closer than they appear to be.
12 posted on 09/29/2024 6:59:19 PM PDT by linMcHlp
To: SunkenCiv
They should find a way to repair and refurbish it with more modern computers and sensors. It would be cheaper than building a new system.................
13 posted on 09/29/2024 7:02:15 PM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegals are put up in 5 Star hotels....................)
To: Red Badger
Starring at the cosmos is navel gazing at its most expensive.
14 posted on 09/29/2024 7:05:51 PM PDT by central_va (I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn...)
To: Red Badger
It would be nice to find a way to clamshell it into a reentry fairing and put it in a museum on Earth. Or, land it on the Moon for display in the first museum on the Moon. :^) It’s been up there a long time and abraded by micrometeors and various rays. :^o
15 posted on 09/29/2024 7:16:55 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
To: Red Badger
I don't think a distance of 12 billion light years is truly possible for the human mind or brain to comprehend.
Just one light year being equal to the distance light travels at 186,000 miles per second times the total number of seconds there are in a year, is difficult enough to comprehend.
I tried to mathematically calculate that distance. The zeroes just killed me. Even after resorting to scientific notation. I'm sure someone here with better math skills than mine can create the equation for the solution, but still the distance is outrageous.
For 12 billion light years? Forget it. I think that kind of distance approaches virtual infinity.
Try thinking about infinity as something that goes on forever without ever ending, and you start going crazy. There's a reason for that. We aren't wired for it.
Not yet, anyway.
16 posted on 09/29/2024 7:19:26 PM PDT by 4Runner
To: Red6
"Don’t know what to say other than “cool.”"
My initial reaction was, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen come from a space telescope. But cool's been taken, so I'll go with ...
... groovy!17 posted on 09/29/2024 7:20:07 PM PDT by Paal Gulli
To: central_va
“Starring at the cosmos is navel gazing at its most expensive.”
I’ll second that.
But hey, some folks can say “Ain’t it cool”?
18 posted on 09/29/2024 7:27:27 PM PDT by simpson96
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