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Hubble Finds Double Einstein Ring
Einstein Duble brings us news that astronomers using the Hubble Telescope have discovered an extremely rare double Einstein Ring. Occasionally, galaxies or other bright objects are located in such a way that they are behind another galaxy when viewed from Earth. When light from the further galaxy passes a sufficiently massive closer galaxy, the path of the light is bent inward from all sides, creating a "ring" effect. In this case, not one, but two galaxies are directly behind the foreground galaxy, so the gravitational lens produces two distinct rings. Quoting Presscue:
"The distribution of dark matter in the foreground galaxies that is warping space to create the gravitational lens can be precisely mapped. In addition, the geometry of the two Einstein rings allowed the team to measure the mass of the middle galaxy precisely to be a value of 1 billion solar masses. The team reports that this is the first measurement of the mass of a dwarf galaxy at cosmological distance (redshift of z=0.6)."
was that Kirk was flying around it picking up Klingons!!
Good thing NASA and others want to sh*tcan the thing. Oh wait, no its not. Lets hope that the upgrade for it mentioned a few days ago goes smoothly, so we can see more cool stuff like this.
Wheres my flying car though?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This is a prime example of the kind of useful knowledge that can be gained with projects like Hubble.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
A double Einstein ring AND it has a red-shift of z=0.6?
If it has a fire magic enchantment, that sucker is going to go for serious bucks on eBay.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
One of the cool implications becomes clear if you realize this means our galaxy is the 4th galaxy in a line with these three. To someone standing on a planet in that backmost galaxy, 11B Ly away: ...
* The one that's the "foreground galaxy" to us would be the inner ring.
* The one that's the "first ring" to us would be the foreground galaxy for them and
* The Milky Way would appear as the outer ring!
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
"In addition, the geometry of the two Einstein rings allowed the team to measure the mass of the middle galaxy precisely to be a value of 1 billion solar masses" precisely eh? Give or take a billion.
This seems like it would be a good opportunity to conduct the double slit experiment on a cosmic scale.
It seems to me that there must be lots of Double Einstein Rings out there, probably millions of them. We're just not standing in the right place to seem most of them.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
And (s)he's got a really big ruler!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
These things line up in space-time as follows: Galaxy 1 is on the line 11 billion years ago, galaxy 2 is on the line 6 billion years ago, galaxy 3 is on the line 3 billion years ago, and the Milky Way is on the line right now.
This does not mean that the reverse is true. It does not mean that there is a line that the Milky Way was on 11 billion years ago, and galaxy 3 was on 8 billion years ago, and galaxy 2 was on 5 billion years ago, and galaxy 3 is on now. Why not? Because galaxies move.
Still, even if not technically correct, it was a really awesome thought by the OP...
As the double ring they found around Uranus
788652 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 19 x 1153
I was afraid it was a trick to make me click on a link to goatse.cx guy.
My first thought was they filmed intergalactic wrestling with the Hubble.
It's real??
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Brannigan: "What the hell is that thing?"
Kif: "It appears to be the mothership"
Brannigan: "Then what did we just blow up?"
Kif: "The Hubble Telescope"
I'm going to go create my own technology news site, with blackjack and hookers. You know what? Forget the news site.
...that this will enable them to defeat Dr. Robotnik by the end of the next level.
Chris Mattern
Don't worry, we can pay for the whole thing by leaving Iraq one or two days earlier. And plus, if you look at it from the financial angle, a space-industrial complex is just as good of an excuse for corporate welfare handouts as the military-industrial complex. The only difference is that if we spent $300 Billion a year on science, we'd probably get something good for humanity out of it.
It's sad that spending money to unravel the secrets of the universe is sneered at (see parent) while large numbers of people and entire news networks (not necessarily including parent) champion spending trillions of dollars to keep poking the middle east hornet's nest (And apparently think that if we keep poking, the hornets will get tired and give up).
I've seen plenty of Libertarians that don't want the government to fund much of anything, ever, because "taxation is theft" or something like that.
I'm glad to see that there are at least a few veins of common sense among the Libertarians, though, because the extreme sort are the most noisy.
And the other problem is the masses of all the galaxies are different. The dwarf galaxy wouldn't act as a lens for them in the same way that the massive galaxy does for us.
Another article on this double ring find.
"Ah, so that's where I left those."
... and then they built the supercollider.
Additionally, the astronomers' significant others are annoyed at them for ruining the coffee table by not putting Eincoasters under their Einsteins.
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble
Hubble finds an Einstein double
Give a shivering man a lit match and it will warm him for a few minutes.
Set him on fire and it will keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Who is this Duble brings us news of hubble finding double?
Meh.
there's a difference between a libertarian and Libertarian.
Hey, gravity-lensing made one of the L's bigger
Table-ized A.I.
That's just God blowing smoke rings
Table-ized A.I.
for this to occur requires four galaxies to be very close to being colinear, and we have to be in one of the endpoints. Looking at the picture though there are several galaxies visible so I suppose they have quite a few to look at for this. I wonder just how rare it is? As in, is this the first one discovered? I'd asume if there were any other known double E rings it would have been mentioned in TFA. Hard to say how rare something is when you only have one of them to go by.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Quote: "The distribution of dark matter in the foreground galaxies that is warping space to create the gravitational lens can be precisely mapped." Really? How can we "precisely map" something that we have never even shown positively to exist yet? The distribution of gravity could be caused my a number of things other than "dark matter". Gravitational disturbance by itself is not evidence for dark matter, any more than it supports at least several other hypotheses.
but they still can't take a pic of the lunar landing sites.
What I love about this is that it provides an obvious example of a law of physics in action. In high school, my physics teacher told me that gravity distorts space, and my reaction was, OK, sure you can probably come to that conclusion through a long series of complex (or at least clever and not immediately obvious) experiments and lots of math, but I'll have to take your word for it.
This, however, is a simple, simple thing that causes anyone who looks at the photo to want an explanation. That makes it so much more concrete. It's no longer just some abstract idea that makes the math work out; instead, the distortion of space by gravity now has a home within a really simple mental framework: it's the reason these rings show up in this photo.
If somebody says they won't believe that gravity distorts space until they see it with their own eyes, you can show them this photo and say, "Well, now you have." (Granted, seeing via the Hubble telescope isn't literally seeing with your own eyes, but most people have looked through a telescope, so they can relate to that and there isn't much difference.)
Larry will be proud.
How deep did it had to go to find his second ring?
Seriously, I'm not being hostile with this question. Is your life better for knowing the precise mass of a galaxy which no human will ever visit? I could go out and mass a stone in my back yard rather precisely with a calibrated instrument right now -- that would advance The Sum Of Human Knowledge, insofar as nobody had ever determined the approximate mass of that particular rock before -- but is that knowledge *useful*?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Ah, yes. and time is a cube.
I love this site. Only in a science article about "Einstein rings" will there be a complete left-field comment out of nowhere like the parent's.
... In addition, the geometry of the two Einstein rings allowed the team to measure the mass of the middle galaxy precisely to be a value of 1 billion solar masses... What the hell kind of "precision" is that?~ In Trust, We Trust ~
OP was implying that this is some sort of scam to get funding; I reply that I find it disheartening a) that NASA is being accused of stunts to get as much money to repair a great instrument of discovery as we spend on Iraq in a day and b) how many people cheer this situation on; I also take a stab at OP's apparent cynicism by saying that if we're gonna have huge corporate handouts, they might as well benefit mankind.
So do you care to point out what exactly is wrong with that?
Study a little physics and you won't have to ask questions like that anymore.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The original story, with images etc. is at
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/04
Of course, this site lacks the amusing comments in the OP's linked site.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Not a physicist myself, so looking for enlightment from one...
I like how dark matter, who's make-up is totally unknown, is used in this "scientific" explanation. Using an "unknown" variable to explain a known one is illogical. These days it seems science is becoming more and more like religion.
Your comment ruined my attempts to search through this thread for my old posts :p
Though my present occupation has its biases. I'd always prefer to see my tax dollars thrown at understanding our universe, rather than war.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
It's significantly less that 1 percent of our national budget. Around 17 billion for 2007.
.6% of our National Budget really does sound a lot better than a quarter of a year in Iraq.
The Iraq War comparison isn't really all that impressive once you do the math. At a couple of hundred million dollars a day, it's closer to 100 days or just over 3 months.
I'd post links but I suck at html, it's early, and there isn't a lot to debate about the numbers.
Maybe they aren't libertarians but some other form of anarchist. I'm sick an tired of libertarianism co-opting every form of anarchism as if they invented it. Libertarians that believe in government funding of anything aren't libertarians, and could be considered anarchists only by a large stretch of the definition. You don't get to redefine words to suit your personal philosophy.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Bill Gates and Microsoft's most famous astronaut fund deep space...
Remember that headline from about 30 seconds ago?
Also if you cut all the insane wasteful spending of the Federal government you put trillions of dollars BACK into the hands of private individuals and businesses who can then turn around and fund the charities and research ventures of their choice rather than the choice of a few who primarily use those funds to abuse their power.
This mantra of "oh my god, we can't possibly take care of ourselves we need the government to do it" is lame.
Wouldn't that be big of you to do what?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
And without the peanut gallery comments about "what a waste of taxpayer money" (even though this particular work is IIRC privately funded), and "gee, why not give up doing astronomy and put those bright boys to work fixing the homeless problem in New Orleans?" (Paraphrasing, but seriously, that's what one comment said.)
TFA was cool, but those comments really depressed me. Sadly, most people still don't understand that their cell phone and their GPS receiver and a half million other things we take for granted are all the result of pure science research at some point. Personally, I'm in favor of understanding the structure of our universe as well as possible. Who knows what ways we might find to exploit what we learn?
This part is the most telling:
..not even close to being a libertarian. If your own petty definition of "libertarian" is defined sufficiently narrowly and that definition placed at the "ideological fundamentalist" end of the spectrum, you'll have no problem pigeon-holing anyone who dares to self-describe with the L-word.Despite the fact that just about everyone falls into a lower-level taxonomic classification than those treated by "libertarian", "conservative", "liberal", "social", and the like, there are many people who are better described at that meta-level by "libertarian" than anything else. "libertarianism" and "minarchism" are not orthogonal.
I know it's easier for you to both hate and slander libertarianism if you can describe all its adherents as the "worst" kind of libertarians, but that characterization is wrong on the face of it. Little 'l' libertarianism is not at all a "new" or "tiny" branch of anarchism; it's just a new name for a bunch of old ideas. Please stop trying to paint the libertarian label uniformly black; it is not uniform and it is certainly not all black.
They didn't give uncertainty bars; they just used the adjective "precisely". Since the mean value for galactic mass among observed galaxies (on the order of tens of billions) is on the order of 100 billion solar masses, I suspect this is a science writer misquoting a (perhaps poorly-written) press release. Even very small galaxies tend to be much larger than 1 billion solar masses, and if the press release sloppily used the word "precision", getting a measurement to *within* 1 billion solar masses would represent a rather small uncertainty on measuring a typical or especially a very large (massive galaxy).
For future reference, solar masses are typically reported in terms of grams or kilograms instead of "Earth masses", because that avoids begging the question. The value 2 * 10^30 kg is not too tough to think about for stellar, interstellar/galactic, and intergalactic scales.
Right off the top of my head, there is the MoND hypothesis, which explains these very kinds of observations at least as well as "dark matter", but does not require that we assume that the universe contains at least 3 times as much mass as previously thought (and observed). There ARE others; I am not prepared to expound on them all here. But look up MoND at Wikipedia... as a hypothesis it has advantages over dark matter, and is much simpler... Occam's Razor and all that, you know.
Light travels a straight path through space-time. Gravity distorts space-time. Light travels the now-distorted path. Now if we can figure out the exact nature of electron 'spin'. ...Lorenzo
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.