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."

Comments

A fitting discovery for Einstein's year

[kkumer]

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.

Re:A fitting discovery for Einstein's year

[dawnread]

He's been dead 50 years and they only just found his ring?

Re:A fitting discovery for Einstein's year

[stevey]

Well just look at other famous figures who've lost their rings for precedent.

Sauron lost his ring for a whole age, so in comparison this was quite a quick job!

Hmmm.....

[Punboy]

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

Re:Hmmm.....

[Anonymous Coward]

We're going to have more powerful ground based (and therefore maintainable) telescopes very soon. A more important science project to keep alive is the Voyagers. It has taken decades to get them where they are, and the deviation of their trajectories from the predicted trajectories is very valuable to get an idea of the dark matter present in our own solar system.

The information available from tracking them, can only be obtained again after more decades of having launched a probe, and it is therefore less easily replaceable.

Re:Hmmm.....

[WindBourne]

I was thinking about those the other day. Personally, I have not understood why GWB's henchman are cutting these little ones. I was thinking that they, like hubble, can be replaced by superior sats. In fact, if we finally get the nuclear power going for remote sats, that we can have something past the voyagers in under a decade and with better instruments.
But then I think about how little the voy. program costs us ( less than a couple million / year total ). Considering that our current deficit is out of sight, I seriously doubt that it will launch the replacements for voys as they cost 1 BILLION each back in the 70s. If we used ion engines, laser transmission, nuke engines, etc., these baby are going to cost 5 billion for a single launch. Not going to happen anytime soon. So best to keep the voys going until they are gone.

As to the hubble, well, there is an new appointee coming who does understand the science.

Re:Hmmm.....

[Anonymous Coward]

So they can buy more bombs.

Please. Liberation devices.

Re:Hmmm.....

[glesga_kiss]

A more important science project to keep alive is the Voyagers. It has taken decades to get them where they are, and the deviation of their trajectories from the predicted trajectories is very valuable to get an idea of the dark matter present in our own solar system.

If that is the cause of the deviation. The dark matter thing is a wild guess there.

It can't be long now that we discovered the Vorgon

[expro]

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 them better...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Get the paper here

[Anonymous Coward]

The paper.

Re:It can't be long now that we discovered the Vor

[Myrmi]

What's a Vorgon

When you have five apple and you eat all but one, you have Vorgon.

Blackhole sucking in Slashdot comments

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bright boy

[dabigpaybackski]

Hey, I think being the father of Quantum Mechanics entitles one to a little booty every now and again.

Re:What?

[mobby_6kl]

Here's what Hawking himself writes:

The term black hole is of very recent origin. It was coined in 1969 by the American scientist John Wheeler as a graphic
description of an idea that goes back at least two hundred years, to a time when there were two theories about light:
one, which Newton favored, was that it was composed of particles; the other was that it was made of waves.
[...]
John Michell, wrote a paper in 1783 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in which he pointed out that a star that was sufficiently massive and compact would have such a strong gravitational field that light could not escape: any light emitted from the surface of the star would be dragged back by the star's gravitational attraction before it could get very far.

Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time, Chapter 6: Black Holes.

"Nearby"?

[theufo]

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.

let the war of the worlds begin

[icepick72]

with a close lensing galaxy and a distant magnified galaxy.

It's like having our own super-weapon -- we can shine our sun through it and fry their planets.

A better ring, and references on lensing

[StupendousMan]

The summary states incorrectly:

Gravitational lenses have been seen many times before, but never so complete ...

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:

• Basic theory of lensing
• Microlensing (lensing by a single star)

New Hubble vs. fixing the old one

[ACNSlave]

Oddly enough, this has been part of the discussion on Hubble for quite some time. Apparently there are upgrades to a number of the modules for Hubble that could just as easily be incorporated into a new telescope for a fraction of the cost of another "rescue" mission. Of course that does not solve the issue of needing to maintain the new telescope...

Bruce

http://bruceneufeld.com/

Re:Visible?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not visible to an amateur scope; it's magnitude 22.2, and I don't think the largest amateur scopes can get past 17 or so. That translates to about 100 times too dim to be seen by them. The value I quoted is the R_c band, which is visible (around 650 nm), if I'm reading the paper correctly. You can read all this yourself in the paper; see the bottom of section 1 on page 2, and Figure 2.

Recursive lensing dependent on our side? 3 Q's

[mattr]

I was wondering if there might be a way to improve resolution of image by scanning across the lens periodically as our planet and solar system move in spacetime, similarly to the way you can get higher resolution by composing many frames of video into a single high resolution (or at least high contrast) print.

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?

Re:Einstein's genius

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Something a lot less worthwhile?