Euclid Telescope Captures Einstein Ring Revealing Warping of Space (theguardian.com) 38
Europe's Euclid space telescope has captured a rare "Einstein ring," showing light from a distant galaxy bent into a perfect circle by the gravity of another galaxy sitting between Earth and the source, the European Space Agency said.
The phenomenon, spotted around galaxy NGC 6505 some 590 million light-years from Earth, reveals the warping of space predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity. The background galaxy, located 4.42 billion light-years away, appears as a complete ring of light around NGC 6505.
"An Einstein ring as perfect as this is extremely rare," said Open University astronomer Stephen Serjeant. Analysis shows NGC 6505 contains about 11% dark matter, a key focus of Euclid's mission to map the universe.
The phenomenon, spotted around galaxy NGC 6505 some 590 million light-years from Earth, reveals the warping of space predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity. The background galaxy, located 4.42 billion light-years away, appears as a complete ring of light around NGC 6505.
"An Einstein ring as perfect as this is extremely rare," said Open University astronomer Stephen Serjeant. Analysis shows NGC 6505 contains about 11% dark matter, a key focus of Euclid's mission to map the universe.
Why are there four bright spots on the ring? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why isn't the ring an ellipse?
Re: (Score:3)
Pure guesswork but I presume we see a roughly circular shape because the galaxy in front looks pretty circular, from our point of view.
The four brighter spots probably reveal the shape of the galaxy behind it, to some degree. It looks like you can draw a straight line from bottom-left to top-right. Top-left and bottom-right are not prefectly aligned, but it looks like you can draw a V between them, whose angle is bisected by the straight line we drew previously. So perhaps the furthest galaxy is not perfect
Re: Why are there four bright spots on the ring? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the background one, the foreground one. The gravitational field of the foreground galaxy (and any other matter in between) is not perfectly even. For some parts of the ring, the strength of the bending is perfect to focus light onto our telescope, for other areas, itâ(TM)s either too strong or too weak, and focussed the light either between us and the nearer galaxy, or behind us. Either way, we get the light from the background galaxy all smeared out, and only capture a tiny fraction compared to the parts where itâ(TM)s well focussed.
Re:Why are there four bright spots on the ring? (Score:5, Funny)
Because as every nerd knows...
There are four lights!!!
Re: Why are there four bright spots on the ring? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Unless I'm misunderstanding the optics of the situation, and there's some quadrupole field producing the focussing. Which there is in the "crossed polars" where I did my optical mineralogy, but I don't see the analogue in this situation.
Ho hum. So the immediate thing to do is to find the paper and read that, not a regurgitated press release.
Re: (Score:1)
God deleted all the ellipses. Didn't match the drapes. Too bad for those sorry ovoids.
Re: (Score:1)
is that where we've landed?
"black holes no real" and "gravity is real and affects objects but not light"
and it's justified not with science but the idea that "physicists are really just lazy and don't want to do tedious math so they make up things instead"
sounds like you've got a nobel in your future, better write these down!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Deflection, do black holes have mass is the question.
Re: (Score:3)
So your answer is "no, black holes do not have mass" which general scientific consensus would disagree with you generally.
Do you think cosmologists claim they can explain every phenomenon we observe in the universe? The boundary of black holes is where theories start to collapse.
Your assertion here seems to be "those nerds havent figured out the unifying theory between GR and Quantum Gravity (or whatever it is), therefore i declare them wrong nd also fucking useless"
Re: (Score:2)
Every textbook I've read on black hole physics is adamant that, assuming a sufficiently low gravitational gradient to avoid spaghettification (etc), an observer passing the event horizon of a black hole would not notice anything happening to mark the event. An even horizon is where the amount of energy needed to climb out of the gravitational potential exceeds the energy of a photon. You wouldn't notice any change in the behaviour of photons tr
Smiley (Score:5, Interesting)
https://science.nasa.gov/missi... [nasa.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
That's where all of Schrodinger's unfortunate lab cats go.
From there they spew revenge, giving us goofy AI, fake news apps, and comic-book-villain-like politicians.
Bending? That's all? (Score:3)
So if you work at it with enough gravity, you can fold space and boom FTL drive.
Don't count on the spice. That way is trouble.
Re: Bending? That's all? (Score:2)
Navigators see spacetime. Keeping my card. Someone had to tell you where and how to fold.
Re: (Score:2)
Because space 'disappears', one is not traveling faster than light. The cost of making space disappear, is getting sucked into the 'fold', oneself. We currently don't have an answer for that. Being able to switch gravity on and off, is one (theoretical) technology for crossing vast distances.
Here's my Dumb Dumb analogy. (Score:3)
Neat effect to the viewer but I guess my dumb idea of warping space doesn't match theirs.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We are Frogs.
Re: (Score:1)
Imagine the progress we'd have by now if Isaac Newton owned a Slip-N-Slide.
Not just predicted by Einstein (Score:2)
As I understand it, Einstein's contribution here was not so much predicting the existence of these rings as explaining their size.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yes, you could say that. People started speculating about the interaction between light and gravity in the mid-late 1700s. And Lorentz (of the contraction/ dilation/ Factor) and Michelson and Morley were looking for experimental evidence of that from a different theoretical basis in the late 1800s (1885 to 1897, IIRC, but I won't go to the gallows over the dates).
Einstein said, at several poin
11% Dark Matter? (Score:2)
How do they know? I thought this stuff was theoretical at best.
Re: (Score:3)
Dark Matter is unconfirmed and largely undefined, but the observations that made us create it are very real.
If in doubt, RTFP ... (Score:2)
The Grauniad article - and the ESA press release - both neglect to mention the scale of the two images presented. Fortunately the paper does (meaning I don't need to hack-about in SIMBAD to measure information about NGC 65 [unistra.fr]