Slashdot Mirror
Largest Lens Ever Discovered
K Tanmay writes "A team of Astronomers have found a natural lens capable of resolving details as fine as 10 microarcseconds across - equivalent to seeing a sugar cube on the Moon, from Earth. The lens comprises of a cloud of interstellar gas, and works on the principle of scintillation; where the clumpiness inside a cloud of gas creates a density change thus bending and focusing the light. This technique, dubbed 'Earth-Orbit Synthesis', will be first used to study black holes in distant quasars, so don't expect spectacular wallpaper replacing images. There's also an interview with Dr. Hayley Bignall, an astronomer from the Joint Institute for Very Long Baseline Interferometry in Europe (JIVE), where she discusses the concept of using interstellar scintillation to get observations that we could never measure from here on earth." Update: 02/22 18:23 GMT by T : That wikipedia link had led to the wrong place; here's the definition for arcsecond if you still want to read it.
What is a quasar? I've never really had a satisfactory explanation for this.
They've found sugar on the MOON!!!
Maybe we need a new method for determining the distance between "scintillation" and "arcsecond".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Does this mean we can finally see the so called "landing site" on the moon? :)
Jeez... everyone knows that cheese and sugar have no business going together. Put a piece of sausage up there and you might have something worth looking at.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Alright! Now we can see the stuff we left on the moon to prove to all of those skeptics. Seriously though, I was just reading about this a couple of weeks ago and they said that no current telescope technology can resolve objects as small as the lunar rover on the moon from earth.
Then what's the point of having the sat up there?
Damn people wasting good money for 'scientific' purposes. Bah.
Jive? Who's running the place? The gang from What's Happening? Is Sherly still fighting with Rerun?
Names mean something. If you look at legislation in the USA, they often try and make laws look like the opposite of what they are, like the patriot act, which takes away civil liberties. So if they want to have the name Jive, they will probably not get the same respect as if they were called Astronomy Scholarly Studies.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
The astronomer is from a group called JIVE? That's whack, yo.
Fantastic! Now the alien people and the tin foil hat wearers can join forces- because not only is their life elsewhere in the universe, by golly, they're SPYING on us! Quick, someone phone Barbara Streisand so she can sue them for photographing her back yard.
There's something in this for everyone, really- even the people who think the rovers are getting sabotaged. After all, when you're a futuristic-technology-wielding, hip happenin' intergalactic alien...hmm, what's the saying? Oh yeah. When you've got a gas-giant lens, the whole universe looks like an ant in need of frying.
Please help metamoderate.
I am not an astrophysist, but does the phrase, "will be first used to study black holes in distant quasars" have any meaning at all?
Kind thoughts do not change the world
In other news, the lens was found approximately three miles away from a giant on all fours combing the ground with his hands.
Okay, but do lenses have real ultimate power?
If we can't see a sugar cude on the moon right now, so how can we tell how this lens is focusing if at all? A few small defects in hubbles lens blured it bad, some thing this big would have alot of area for defects. to me that seams like it would make a very bad lens. So my real question is? how is this usefull?
...
The caption to one of the illustrations reads:
At some times of the year, both the Earth and the cloud 'lens' are moving in the same direction, and the observed variations are slow, but six months later they are moving in opposite directions and the variations are fast.
while the illustrations clearly shows a a wave which is of constant frequency but of varying amplitude. I believe the caption is correct...
And a related complaint: what is the point of including a picture of the ring nebula with the caption:
The Ring Nebula, although not useful imaging through, has the suggestive look of a far-away telescope lens.
I guess when you can't come up with any images actually related to the topic, you might as well throw in some pretty Hubble pictures for those who aren't going to read the text anyway.
"This technique, dubbed 'Earth-Orbit Synthesis', will be first used to study black holes in distant quasars, so don't expect spectacular wallpaper replacing images. "
Two words: Accretion disc.
Black holes themselves may be, well, *black*, but all the stuff swirling into them and/or being ejected from the poles glows nicely. And if that's the sort of thing making the quasar so bright, the images should be spectacular indeed. (note: it'll be a false-color image)
I remember seeing a photo of this array as a child. Back then it only had five dishes. I had no idea that it had been filled out. Why don't we hear about this sort of thing?
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
... wonder how long it takes to figure how to combine array of these to create virtual super-scope ( like DARWIN) and start watchin' exoplanets.
I wonder if we can use it to find SCO's future?
"This technique... will be first used to study black holes in distant quasars, so don't expect spectacular wallpaper replacing images."
Hmmm, would the wallpaper at least work as a secure-delete black hole where files will never come back? That could come in handy for er... nevermind.
It will be interesting to see whether such phenomena are actually found.
Some scientists have theorized that quasars are *not* distant galaxies, but stars with a peculiar lens-effect that causes a very large perceived red shift.
Part of the problem with the idea that the red shift is a doppler effect is that the observed quasars are apparently all in a relatively spherical arrangement about the Earth, thus implying that the Earth must be the center of the observed universe.
It could be that this is just an artifact of observation: we see the quasars as equidistant from Earth because we are perceiving them from Earth. But it is very strange and implies a problem with the theory.
A paper on this subject is available.
Peace and love, y'all
You'd have to be some kind of supreme nerd to require a lens of THAT prescription.
- A
Definition of an Arcsecond: "Quit portscanning me."
I guess they don't slike being slashdotted?
So is this "The Largest Lens, Ever Discovered" or "The Largest Lens Ever, Discovered"?
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
This is nothing new, I assure you.
I've been doing this in my bathroom for years.
*ducks*
Even it is a fascinating thing to have such a telescopic capacity towards Mars and that for free, I wouldn't like to see a mass like that between the red planet and us.
Let's hope everyone's kind enough not to post goatse or tubgirl on the TWO wikipedia pages linked.
Uh, isn't Wikipedia suffering enough from overuse and underfunding of it's bandwidth/serverload...I mean seriously, can't you editors find another site to use as a dictionary?
alright, who's the joker wo updated wiki?!
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
No, but maybe we can finally resolve your "penis" with this lens.
Definition links on Slashdot went to Everything2, not Wikipedia.
Normally there's a little ? next to the word which links to E2.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
You don't need a lense to look out into space to find SCO's future. You need a shovel. And perhaps a few friends to speed things up.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
Uh...someone -please- tell me how this was a troll. It was a -joke-.
Thank god for the meta-moderation system.
Please help metamoderate.
Oh, I apologize in advance for this, but K Tanmay has been busted by the Grammar Police for the following:
Semicolons are used for separating independent clauses, not dependent ones. Use a comma instead.
Again, sorry. This is just my...
[/pet peeve]
My other
> alright, who's the joker wo updated wiki?!
The page history shows it to be some loser by the name of 12.216.3.69.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
1. Lenses are mammals.
2. Lenses refract ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the lens is to flip out and bend light.
...
His name is bloodnut the flatulent.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
The length of a telescope needed to peer into the mouth of the blazar would have to be gigantic, about a million kilometers wide.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Wow! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?!?!
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
...a globular cluster of these!
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
The lens comprises of a cloud of interstellar gas
You've got two choices here.
1. The lens is comprised of
2. The lens consists of
You didn't choose either. You made a bad choice.
You're a bleating moron.
The giant, intergalactic being wearing the lense has been identified as one 'Hans Moleman'...
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
So, what is this intergalactic pervert all about?
I simply refuse to put up with limp, Satanic, fellow-travelling shit like this piece of sub-human garbage in your pewling, idiotic post:
"Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) "
Let's count the errors, shall we?It's a super massive blackhole in the center of the galaxy that's consuming massive amounts of gas in it's accretion disk. The gas is accelerated to near the speed of light as it falls into the black hole, and at the same time it compressed together heating it to fantastic temperatures over a huge area. Once more this process also causes a intense jet of radiation to be shot out from the spinning poles of the black hole.
Quasar refers to a Quasi-stellar Radio Scource.
Quote:
Slashdot PWNED
It's good to see the maturity of the average slashdotter showing up in the wiki.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Can't you take a minute and think about it
and come up with another explanation as to why
you see what you call 'Early Universe' ??
But that only because it's not a very good one.
Nothing personal. It's just that good trolls should be patently obvious to even the casual observer. And to some observers of your post it certainly is obvious what it really is. But this is slashdot, now your audiance. Next time aim lower.
Good effort.
There's also an interview with Dr. Hayley Bignall, [...], where he discusses [...].
/. story, amongst others.
He? I know astrophysicist is a male-dominated profession. But a name like 'Hayley' should at the very least make one wonder. See this page to accurately determine Dr. Bignall's gender.
Furthermore, this is nothing really new; see this
Still, it's a very creative way of increasing resolution! Not to mention difficult and time-consuming. I wonder how believable the results are. I use a similar technique (called Speckle Masking) to eliminate earth-atmosphere scintillation from Solar observations, with astounding results. These, however, can be checked against single 'lucky shot' images of extrodinary quality or observations from space...
Cheers,
Alfred
Hubble has a resolution of .05 arcs, what does this translate to, .0010 arcs? or what?
> A team of Astronomers have found a natural lens capable of resolving details as fine as 10 microarcseconds across ...
;)
here's the definition for arcsecond if you still want to read it.
After following one link from above page (to this page), we get:
In astronomy, one can measure the angular separation of two stars by imagining two lines through the Earth, each one intersecting one of the stars. Then the angle between those lines can be measured; this is the angular separation between the two stars.
Great, more Earth-centric stuff. Galileo is turning in his grave!
I'm not an astronomer (far from it), and it just seems silly and cocky to me, an outsider to the field, that we use the Earth to measure stuff. I can quickly come up with better (IMHO) points of reference: the Sun, the center of our galaxy, the center of the universe (do we know where it is?). Of course, there may be a perfectly valid reason to do this, in which case ignore this
Must-not-watch TV!
Are you fucking retarded for modding this asshole up? He's just copied some basic crap from a physics website! And it isn't even interesting because everyone has to learn that stuff in high school.
Also, check his posting history and you'll find that he is a rather annoying troll who should never post at +2 again.
High precision timing of millisecond pulsars (which accounts for every single rotation of a pulsar over the course of several years) can make observations with astrometric (i.e. positional) errors of several micro arcseconds.
An excellent example was published in Nature in 2001. Here is a preprint. The work describes the timing of the nearby (~450 lt-yrs) millisecond pulsar J0437-4715. The proper motion (movement across the sky) and parallax (apparent motion on the sky due to the earth's orbit) of the pulsar were measured to extreme precision, and a new test of General Relativity was also given.
PS: IAAPA (I am a pulsar astronomer)
So according to Rayleigh's formula, that kind of resolution would mean that the lens diameter would be about 13 km (for visible light having a wavelength of 500 nm). Of course, with a lens that big one would have serious aberration problems. (First-year-physics-student syndrome made me do it.)
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
Replace Babel fish with natural lens capable of resolving details as fine as 10 microarcseconds across
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
The earth is at the center of the observable universe, pretty much by definition. Unless of course the observer in question isn't on the earth.
Good point.
Of course, the problem of the "what constitutes the observable universe?" is easily resolved by smartly knocking the observer upside the head with a telescope.
-kgj
-kgj
See this for the original Slashdot story. The press release is at the Australia Telescope National Facility website.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
I studied I.S. a little bit awhile back. Carl Sagan did some work on scintillation; the scintillation effect can pull out a distant radio signal by gathering in rays from a lot of different directions and accidentally throwing them right at you. The famous WOW signal, I believe, was investigated as an example of scintillation from a big cloud much like the ones described in the article.
It is interesting to see this technique used to do radio astronomy. Most of the times when you encounter a natural lens, it is sufficiently weird that you use the observation to analyse the lens itself, and not what it happens to be magnifying. Gravitational lenses are interesting in large part because you can try to figure out the distribution of dark matter in the lens itself -- and not because you can use it to "see into" the object being lensed. These lenses are not exactly perfect optics -- they're more like balls of glass, which distort and differentially magnify something behind.
But I'm not as familiar any more with radio astronomy. It is definitely possible that we understand enough about the properties of the ISM that the more interesting problem of figuring out the properties of the background object is open for work. Very cool!
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
...Canon surrenders.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I don't really get how they put the image(s) back together. The clouds are not perfectly round and it is like observing one point at a time at best, and hard to know what point it is because the "lens" changes what it is looking at. I suppose the motion of the cloud and earth through space will give a "scan-line" like sample, but it would still almost be like trying to figure out what the sun looks like by studying the sparkley net-like wavey patterns at the bottom of a swimming pool.
Table-ized A.I.
No, but maybe we can finally resolve your "penis" with this lens.
Bad science there duude, you're already assuming it exists before having found it.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
you obviously offended some gay man that digs streisand and had moderator points.
so that explains the chinese entry into the space-race.
sig under development
All we need now is to find a large reflecting object at a distance of a 1000 light years and we can observe our own history while looking through this telescope and see if the Romans had invented sugar cubes before us. Its time we got some concrete observations about what the Romans did for us.
The lens comprises of a cloud of interstellar gas, Actually, the lens is composed of a cloud of interstellar gas. Alternately, the lens comprises a cloud of interstellar gas.
SPECTRE has announced that Ernst Stavro Blofeld has successfully aligned the interstellar-gas lens with the stellar diamond and it is now focused at major population centers on Earth. World governments are attempting to come up with the ransom. More at 11.......
In case you don't know, it's the tradition follow-up to a Chinese fortune cookie reading.
I'm not sure who wouldn't know that. It's also always been the traditional followup to any Slashdot post.
On de Moon, firs' you get de sugar, den you get de power, den you get de weemmon!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.