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Near-Perfect Einstein Ring Discovered
Fraser Cain writes "Universe Today is reporting on the discovery of a nearly perfect Einstein Ring; a gravitational lens of a nearby galaxy working as a natural telescope to focus the light from a more distant galaxy. Gravitational lenses have been seen many times before, but never so complete, with a close lensing galaxy and a distant magnified galaxy."
Well, this is a nice discovery to celebrate the 100 years of the Einstein's miraculous year and 50 years since the guy passed away.
See, now they have a really good reason to get up there and maintain Hubble. I mean seriously, what better reason than to focus hubble on that Einstein ring and get a very upclose view of a distant galaxy
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
It can't be long now that we noticed the lens of the Vorgon sighting device. Are you sure those are galaxies on the other side, and not the twinkling of a charging energy device of a demolition crew?
If we can see that universe better, the opposite is true, they can see us better.
That being said, I want to be the first to welcome our new voyeuristic overlords.
The paper.
"If we can see that universe better, the opposite is true, they can see us better."
Well humans being the rascals they are, will simply moon them.
What's a Vorgon
When you have five apple and you eat all but one, you have Vorgon.
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
Today in science, experts focus on Einstein's gigantic ring to see what they can find.
Scientists report their need to explore the depth of the dark matter in Einstein's ring sometimes called Einstein's black hole.
"In the interests of space science, we need to plunge into the ring and extract the hidden dark matter" said one scientist from NASA's space laboratory.
"Soon we anticipate manned explorations inside the ring that will explain the enormous amounts of strange gas and dark matter inside. We are very excited about this" concluded NASA officials.
You mean like his womanizing? ;-)
Recently a tiny blackhole was discovered near ./ server room. It causes most of astronomically related comments to vanish into another dimention.
As a proof, I show you 34 comments in about 90 minutes. There's simply no other reasonable explanation for this phenomenon, but I'm currently using a galaxy telescope to conduct further investigation.
Hey, I think being the father of Quantum Mechanics entitles one to a little booty every now and again.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time, Chapter 6: Black Holes.
It's seven billion lightyears away! The article specifically notes that the great distance makes it even more special.
And because it's so far away, while still in focus, we can look back further than ever before. It'll be interesting to see some theories about the early universe shattered to pieces.
They had computers in the early 1900's?
It's like having our own super-weapon -- we can shine our sun through it and fry their planets.
FTFA:
According to the paper, the ring inscribes a "C-shaped" circle of 270 degrees in near-complete circumference with an apparent radius of slightly more than 1 3/4 arc seconds - roughly the size of a star's "virtual" image seen at high power through a small amateur telescope.
So would this thing be visible with a small amateur telescope, or is it too dim? Does it even emit in the visible spectrum?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Crap, now I have to show the picture on the site to someone else, otherwise I'll be visited by Einstein's ghost.
The summary states incorrectly:
Way back in 1989, radio astronomers found a gravitational lens near the galaxy MG1643+1346 which creates two images, one of which is a nearly complete circular ring. Take a look at this radio image from Langston et al., AJ 97, 1283 (1989):
Click to see radio image of lensed quasar.
So, this newest system is a pretty good lens, but not the "most complete" one yet found.
By the way, if you want to understand how gravitational lensing works, you can read some lectures I wrote for an introductory astronomy class:
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Bruce
http://bruceneufeld.com/
Today is a good day to code.
Well that seems to be relatively obvious and maybe insignificant compared to what can be done just by improving the receiving setup.
So I thought, if we increase our telescope resolution to the point where we can get a very high resolution image of the 11 bn ly galaxy, and find a perfect Einstein ring in that, might it not be then possible to find an even farther (say 20 bn ly galaxy) that might by fabulous luck be lined up with it, and thereby (luck again) piggy back all the way up to the end of visible space?
So question 1) If we had a 1 AU wide telescope and enough Einstein rings, just how far do you think we could really see?
This sounds similar to the idea of pointing a big telescope at the edge of a black hole to view the entire universe (since light can orbit many times before leaving, at least according to a neat story called the Planck Dive). So 2) assuming the black holes or something close enough to them really exist in our galaxy, what could such a large telescope reveal by focusing on the edge of such a black hole, and 3) is there any way possible to use one possibly in conjunction with piggy backed Einstein rings to see light beyond what is the "visible universe" i.e. the point at which expanding space has expanded beyond our light cone.
It would seem that an image that had been captured by a black hole before much expansion had occurred could conceivably be accessible now (if black holes truly can be "read" that way not just in fiction) even though the space being imaged has long expanded far beyond the edge of the visible universe. IANA astronomer but interested in where fact and fiction separate and neat ways to use computer graphic techniques and telescopes. Can anybody experienced answer some of these questions?
Something a lot less worthwhile?
Would this ring, or others like it, work in two directions? i.e. diverging electromagnetic radiation sourcing from here across the space we see 'through' the lens?
Just curious.
Uh, if you're referring to the Vogons from H2G2, see previous spelling.
Goten Xiao
With all the miraculous things he did for the world in the realm of science, one wonders what we'd have if he'd devoted his mind to politics, or computers.
Politics: Not that much. At best, we'd have no nuclear bombs and another dead jew in Germany. (Or, at most, we might have entered WWII earlier, but with no A-bomb we'd still be fighting it...)
Computers: Diddly. Einstein's genius was seeing the correlation between things, not the minutae of math. He would have sucked at the personnal computer.
The James Webb telescope is not even on the drawing board yet and will not work in visual wavelengths so any spare HST hardware would only be useful if it were designed for IR. What space telescope are you going to launch by 2008 when the HST will fail? The JWST isn't going up until around 2015 (originally expected to launch in 2011 but now very unlikely). Do we want to go 3-7 years without a good space telescope? I know of no other plans for a telescope to go up using those HST parts. By the time you design one, build it and launch it I'm not sure it will have been worth it. Expensive or not, fixing the HST with astronauts and the space shuttle is the fastest (and probably the only real) solution to keeping a space telescope working continuously in the near future.
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
Weight, which is a Newtonian concept, is not really applicable to an inherently relativistic particle such as the photon. In addition, the effect of gravity on a photon is actually about twice as large as you would expect from Newtonian gravitation. This comes from the weak-field limit of general relativity, and was one of the first tests of the theory. In 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington observed the bending of starlight around the sun during a solar eclipse, and showed that the bending was, lo and behold, about twice as large as the Newtonian prediction, and consistent with general relativity.