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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.
They've found sugar on the MOON!!!
A starlike object that may send out radio waves and other forms of energy; large red shifts imply enormous recession velocities [dictionary.com]
Hope that's satisfactory.
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".
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.
> What is a quasar?
Here's the Wikipedia article on quasars.
> I've never really had a satisfactory explanation for this.
Sorry; satisfaction isn't guaranteed.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.
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?
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?
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...
> 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
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
...a globular cluster of these!
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
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.
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
At the risk of being inscansipitory.
That is an independant clause.
"The clumpiness inside a cloud of gas creates a density change thus bending and focusing the light." is a complete sentence, perhaps not a very good one....
"Where" in this case is used to more closely connect the two ideas. In a manner not too dissimilar from "; however,". You were right, there is a comma missing. You were also mostly wrong. The semicolon is proper in this case, and you misidentified a clause.
So for failing grammer nazi training, please go shoot yourself in the head, with a firearm.
Actually, that is not satisfactory... Your definition was valid in the 60's and 70's but not today.
Now we know that they are distant galaxies that have active nuclei. The nuclei are powered by supermassive (10^6-10^8 solar masses) black holes. What we are seeing is the point-like emission from near these black holes (i.e. the jets and/or an accretion disk). The radiation is often visible in radio, optical, and X-ray bands.
PS: IAAA (I am an astronomer)
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)
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.
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!
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