2025 February 26

Einstein Ring Surrounds Nearby Galaxy Center
* Image Credit & Copyright: ESA, NASA, Euclid Consortium;
https://www.nasa.gov/
https://www.esa.int/
https://www.euclid-ec.org/consortium/about-ec/
* Processing: J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi, T. Li
https://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/~jcc/

Explanation:
Do you see the ring? If you look very closely at the center of the featured galaxy NGC 6505, a ring becomes evident. It is the gravity of NGC 6505, the nearby (z = 0.042) elliptical galaxy that you can easily see, that is magnifying and distorting the image of a distant galaxy into a complete circle. To create a complete Einstein ring there must be perfect alignment of the nearby galaxy's center and part of the background galaxy. Analysis of this ring and the multiple images of the background galaxy help to determine the mass and fraction of dark matter in NGC 6505's center, as well as uncover previously unseen details in the distorted galaxy. The featured image was captured by ESA's Earth-orbiting Euclid telescope in 2023 and released earlier this month.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/euclid-discovers-einstein-ring-in-our-cosmic-backyard/
https://www.euclid-ec.org/einstein-ring-in-ngc-6505/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_6505
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06505

https://science.nasa.gov/dark-matter/

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid_overview

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250226.html

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

ESA's Euclid mission is surveying the sky to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe.

But how can Euclid see the invisible? Watch this video to learn about the light-bending effect that enables scientists to trace how dark matter is distributed in the Universe.

By making use of Euclid’s flagship simulation, the video illustrates how dark-matter filaments subtly alter the shape of galaxies. Light travelling to us from vastly distant galaxies is bent and distorted by concentrations of matter along its way. The effect is called gravitational lensing because matter (both ‘normal’ and dark matter) acts as a kind of magnifying glass.

Scientists distinguish between strong and weak gravitational lensing. In strong gravitational lensing distortions of background galaxies or other light sources are very apparent, resulting in arcs, multiple images or so-called Einstein rings. In weak lensing, background sources appear only mildly stretched or displaced. This means we can only detect this effect by analysing large numbers of sources in a statistical way.

The further we look, the more prominent the distortions from weak gravitational lensing are, because there are more dark-matter structures acting as lenses between us and the light sources.

Euclid will measure the distorted shapes of billions of galaxies over 10 billion years of cosmic history, providing a 3D view of the dark matter distribution in our Universe. This will shed light on the nature of this mysterious component.

The map of the distribution of galaxies over cosmic time will also teach us about dark energy, which affects how quickly the Universe expands. By charting the Universe’s large-scale structure in unprecedented detail, Euclid will enable scientists to trace how the expansion has changed over time.

* CREDIT
ESA/Euclid Consortium/Cacao Cinema

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2024/09/Weak_gravitational_lensing_how_Euclid_maps_dark_matter

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

A team of astronomers used the magnifying effect of the stars located in a spiral galaxy to ‘zoom in’ to another galaxy, known as PKS 1830-211, that lies along the same line of sight from Earth but is much farther away. Thanks to this unusual set-up, they could pick out very small structures in the distant galaxy, corresponding to the vicinity of the supermassive black hole. The black hole is devouring material from its surroundings while firing powerful jets of particles that emit light up to the high energies of gamma rays. Observing these jets with ESA’s Integral and NASA’s Fermi and Swift satellites, the astronomers could measure the size of the region around the black hole where they originate.

Our telescopes will never be powerful enough to reveal these inner regions, but the intervening gravitational lens made the measurement possible. This is the first time that gravitational microlensing has been used with gamma rays to dissect the high-energy processes taking place around a supermassive black hole.

CREDIT
ESA/ATG medialab

https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2015/07/gravitational_lensing/15506218-1-eng-GB/Gravitational_lensing_pillars.jpg

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

2022 July 5

A Molten Galaxy Einstein Ring
* Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Jha;
https://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~saurabh/
https://www.esa.int/
https://esahubble.org/
https://www.nasa.gov/
* Processing: Jonathan Lodge
https://www.instagram.com/jjlodge/

Explanation:
It is difficult to hide a galaxy behind a cluster of galaxies. The closer cluster's gravity will act like a huge lens, pulling images of the distant galaxy around the sides and greatly distorting them. This is just the case observed in the featured image recently re-processed image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The cluster GAL-CLUS-022058c is composed of many galaxies and is lensing the image of a yellow-red background galaxy into arcs seen around the image center. Dubbed a molten Einstein ring for its unusual shape, four images of the same background galaxy have been identified. Typically, a foreground galaxy cluster can only create such smooth arcs if most of its mass is smoothly distributed -- and therefore not concentrated in the cluster galaxies visible. Analyzing the positions of these gravitational arcs gives astronomers a method to estimate the dark matter distribution in galaxy clusters, as well as infer when the stars in these early galaxies began to form.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210802.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210823.html
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-sees-a-molten-ring/
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/
https://esahubble.org/images/potw2050a/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
https://noirlab.edu/science/programs/ctio/telescopes/soar-telescope/news/gravitational-arcs-galaxy-cluster-abel-370

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220705.html

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

A Gallery of Einstein Rings - NASA Science

The thin blue bull's-eye patterns in these eight Hubble Space Telescope images appear like neon signs floating over reddish-white blobs. The blobs are giant elliptical galaxies roughly 2 to 4 billion light-years away. The bull's-eye patterns are created as the light from galaxies twice as far away is distorted into circular shapes by the gravity of the giant elliptical galaxies. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago. Gravitational lensing occurs when the gravitational field from a massive object warps space and deflects light from a distant object behind it.

The bull's-eye patterns are so-called "Einstein rings," which are the most elegant manifestation of the lensing phenomenon. Einstein rings are produced when two galaxies are almost perfectly aligned, one behind the other.

The images were taken between August 2004 and March 2005 by the Hubble telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. They are part of an ongoing survey, called the Sloan Lens ACS (or SLACS) Survey, of about 150 galaxies to hunt for gravitational lenses. So far, the survey has netted 19 new gravitational lenses, adding significantly to the 100 or so previously known lenses. The survey also has identified eight new Einstein rings. Only three such rings had been seen previously in visible light.

Credit:
NASA, ESA, and the SLACS Survey team: A. Bolton (Harvard/ Smithsonian), S. Burles (MIT), L. Koopmans (Kapteyn), T. Treu (UCSB), and L. Moustakas (JPL/Caltech)

https://science.nasa.gov/asset/hubble/a-gallery-of-einstein-rings/

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

2022 May 11

Gravity's Grin
* Image Credit: X-ray - NASA / CXC / J. Irwin et al. ;
http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05501
https://chandra.harvard.edu/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/
* Optical - NASA/STScI
http://www.stsci.edu/

Explanation:
Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, published over 100 years ago, predicted the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. And that's what gives these distant galaxies such a whimsical appearance, seen through the looking glass of X-ray and optical image data from the Chandra and Hubble space telescopes. Nicknamed the Cheshire Cat galaxy group, the group's two large elliptical galaxies are suggestively framed by arcs. The arcs are optical images of distant background galaxies lensed by the foreground group's total distribution of gravitational mass. Of course, that gravitational mass is dominated by dark matter. The two large elliptical "eye" galaxies represent the brightest members of their own galaxy groups which are merging. Their relative collisional speed of nearly 1,350 kilometers/second heats gas to millions of degrees producing the X-ray glow shown in purple hues. Curiouser about galaxy group mergers? The Cheshire Cat group grins in the constellation Ursa Major, some 4.6 billion light-years away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications_by_Albert_Einstein
https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2015/cheshirecat/
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111221.html
https://www.lsst.org/science/dark-matter

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220511.html

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

2023 November 10

UHZ1: Distant Galaxy and Black Hole
* Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/Ákos Bogdán; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI;
https://chandra.harvard.edu/
* Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare & K. Arcand

Explanation:
Dominated by dark matter, massive cluster of galaxies Abell 2744 is known to some as Pandora's Cluster. It lies 3.5 billion light-years away toward the constellation Sculptor. Using the galaxy cluster's enormous mass as a gravitational lens to warp spacetime and magnify even more distant objects directly behind it, astronomers have found a background galaxy, UHZ1, at a remarkable redshift of Z=10.1. That puts UHZ1 far beyond Abell 2744, at a distance of 13.2 billion light-years, seen when our universe was about 3 percent of its current age. UHZ1 is identified in the insets of this composited image combining X-rays (purple hues) from the spacebased Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared light from the James Webb Space Telescope. The X-ray emission from UHZ1 detected in the Chandra data is the telltale signature of a growing supermassive black hole at the center of the ultra high redshift galaxy. That makes UHZ1's growing black hole the most distant black hole ever detected in X-rays, a result that now hints at how and when the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed.
https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2023/uhz1/
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-107

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130408.html
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02750
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15458

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231110.html

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

"Let's see what our telescopes are capable of with the help of gravitational lensing:"

Take a Tour of Pandora's Cluster

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope presents a new view of Abell 2744, also known as Pandora's cluster, displaying various depths of space in a single image. Ranging from a foreground star in our own galaxy ... to the mega cluster forming as multiple massive galaxy clusters merge 4 billion light years away ... to the even more distant galaxies behind the cluster, whose light is magnified and distorted by the mega-clusters' warping of space time. Without the cluster's magnification boost, even the Webb Telescope could not see these faint, extremely distant galaxies. Some features that Webb shows distinctly like this dusty red galaxy were not detected at all when the Hubble Space Telescope studied the region. Astronomers are using this image to choose certain galaxies for follow up to get precise distance measurements and details about intriguing features.

This small red dot is a distant source of infrared light that has so far defied characterization. It must be extremely compact because even with the visual stretching caused by the cluster's warped space-time, it still appears as a tiny dot. One theory is that it is a glowing disk of gas surrounding a supermassive Black hole in the early universe. Webb's follow-up observations will further reveal the wonders of Pandora's cluster, and uncover a new understanding of the universe.

Credits
*Video
STScI, Danielle Kirshenblat
* Music
PremiumBeat Music, Klaus Hergersheimer
* Science
Ivo Labbe (Swinburne), Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh)
* Image Processing
STScI, Alyssa Pagan

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/videos/2023/107/01GS5SCDZKWA0Q1MYJ3PHVY3TQ?news=true

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

NASA Telescopes Discover Record-Breaking Black Hole

The main image of this release features a glimpse of a black hole in an early stage of its development, just 470 million years after the Big Bang.

The composite image shows data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope. It features scores of seemingly tiny celestial objects in a sea of black. This is the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. When magnified, the tiny white, orange, and purple celestial objects are revealed to be spiral and elliptical galaxies, and gleaming stars. Many of these colorful specks appear to float in a neon purple cloud of X-ray gas in the center of the image, some 3.5 billion light-years from Earth.

Just to the right of center, at the edge of the purple gas cloud, is a tiny orange speck. This speck is far in the distance, well beyond the Abell galaxy cluster. It represents a galaxy 13.2 billion light-years from Earth containing a supermassive black hole.

In this composite image packed with celestial objects, the tiny orange speck is easily overlooked. Therefore, the main image of the release is also presented fully labelled. In the labelled version of the image, a thin box outlines the distant galaxy, and two enlargements are inset at our upper left. In the enlargement showing Chandra data, a hazy, neon purple oval with a light pink core is shown. This purple oval represents intense X-rays from a growing supermassive black hole estimated to weigh between 10 and 100 million suns. The purple oval is not visible in the composite image because of the way the Chandra data was processed.

This black hole is located in the distant galaxy in the center of the enlargement showing Webb data.

https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2023/uhz1/

* video compressed with
$ ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 20 out.mp4

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

TOPIC> Gravitational Lensing
starts here:
https://defcon.social/@grobi/114374350096488478

Gravitational Lensing - Nature's Boost

For me, this is the most wonderful scientific statement on the phenomenon of gravitational lensing!

Senior Project Scientist Dr. Jennifer Wiseman calls this 'miracle' 'Nature's Boost'.

See the sparkle in her eyes and hear the enthusiasm in her voice when she explains this phenomenon to us in her understandable and accessible way.

It is not that scientists do not see miracles or are not touched by those .. for them it is just not a sin or a drama to fathom the background to newly discovered phenomena.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/science-behind-the-discoveries/hubble-gravitational-lenses/

* video converted and compressed with
$ ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 25 out.mp4

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

Gravitational Lensing Today

Excerpts from "Hubble Gravitational Lenses" by Andrea Gianopoulos and "For the First Time Hubble Directly Measures Mass of a Lone White Dwarf" by NASA Hubble Mission Team

Today, Hubble astronomers continue to use the century-old General Relativity/Eddington Experiment to measure distant objects in the universe. For the first time, they measured the mass of a lone white dwarf — the dense, burned-out remnant of a Sun-like star — by seeing how much its gravity deflected the light from a background star. The researchers found that the white dwarf, called LAWD 37, is 56 percent the mass of our Sun, which agrees with earlier theoretical predictions of the white dwarf's mass and corroborated current theories of how white dwarfs evolve as the end product of a typical star's evolution.

When the mass of the lensing object is much larger, like a large galaxy or cluster of galaxies, the effects of gravitational lensing can resemble a house of mirrors. The gravitational lens not only bends and magnifies the light of distant objects, but distorts it in both space and time.

One example of this spacetime distortion lies in the galaxy cluster 0024+1654, seen above. The gravitational lens forms as a result of the cluster's tremendous gravitational field that bends light to magnify, brighten, and stretches the image of a more distant object. How distorted the image becomes and how many copies are made depends on the alignment between the foreground cluster and the more distant galaxy, which is behind the cluster. In this photograph, light from the distant galaxy bends as it passes through the cluster, dividing the galaxy into five separate images. The light also distorted the galaxy's image from a normal spiral shape into a more arc-shaped object.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/science-behind-the-discoveries/hubble-gravitational-lenses/
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/for-the-first-time-hubble-directly-measures-mass-of-a-lone-white-dwarf/

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

Euclid Opens Data Treasure Chest: Insights into the Depths of the Universe ESA's

Euclid mission publishes first survey data.

19. March 2025 Today, the European Space Agency's Euclid mission released its first batch of survey data, including a preview of its deep fields. Here, hundreds of thousands of galaxies in different shapes and sizes are the focus and show an insight into their large-scale arrangement in the cosmic web. The data sharing covers a huge area of the sky in three mosaics. It also includes numerous galaxy clusters, active galactic nuclei and transient phenomena, as well as the first classification study of more than 380 000 galaxies and 500 gravitational lensing candidates compiled by combined artificial intelligence and citizen science initiatives. All this paves the way for the wide range of topics that the detective of the dark universe Euclid will tackle with his extensive data set.

Euclid combines high-resolution imaging with large sky coverage for the first time.

"Euclid's unique observational capabilities could help to better determine the expansion rate of the universe through gravitational-wave observations," explains Miguel Zumalacárregui, group leader in the Department of Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity at @mpi_grav in the Potsdam Science Park. To this end, the researchers want to correlate gravitational waves measured by @LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA with Euclid's galaxy catalogues. In addition, the large number of gravitational lensing systems discovered by Euclid plays an important role. "Euclid's observations could also be crucial for the detection of the first gravitational waves, which are split into multiple images by gravitational lensing," Zumalacárregui adds.

https://www.aei.mpg.de/1240587/euclid-opens-data-treasure-trove-offers-glimpse-of-deep-fields

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A gravitational lens is matter,
such as a cluster of galaxies or a point particle, that bends light from a distant source as it travels toward an observer. The amount of gravitational lensing is described by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. If light is treated as corpuscles travelling at the speed of light, Newtonian physics also predicts the bending of light, but only half of that predicted by general relativity.

Orest Khvolson (1924) and Frantisek Link (1936) are generally credited with being the first to discuss the effect in print, but it is more commonly associated with Einstein, who made unpublished calculations on it in 1912 and published an article on the subject in 1936.

In 1937, Fritz Zwicky posited that galaxy clusters could act as gravitational lenses, a claim confirmed in 1979 by observation of the Twin QSO SBS 0957+561.

Unlike an optical lens, a point-like gravitational lens produces a maximum deflection of light that passes closest to its center, and a minimum deflection of light that travels furthest from its center. Consequently, a gravitational lens has no single focal point, but a focal line. The term "lens" in the context of gravitational light deflection was first used by O. J. Lodge, who remarked that it is "not permissible to say that the solar gravitational field acts like a lens, for it has no focal length". If the (light) source, the massive lensing object, and the observer lie in a straight line, the original light source will appear as a ring around the massive lensing object (provided the lens has circular symmetry). If there is any misalignment, the observer will see an arc segment instead.
>>

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

<<_>>

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This phenomenon was first mentioned in 1924 by the St. Petersburg physicist Orest Khvolson, and quantified by Albert Einstein in 1936. It is usually referred to in the literature as an Einstein ring, since Khvolson did not concern himself with the flux or radius of the ring image. More commonly, where the lensing mass is complex (such as a galaxy group or cluster) and does not cause a spherical distortion of spacetime, the source will resemble partial arcs scattered around the lens. The observer may then see multiple distorted images of the same source; the number and shape of these depending upon the relative positions of the source, lens, and observer, and the shape of the gravitational well of the lensing object.

[TODAY:
Using an initial sweep by artificial intelligence models, followed by citizen science inspection, expert vetting and modelling, a first catalogue of 500 galaxy-galaxy strong lens candidates was created, almost all of which were previously unknown. This type of lensing happens when a foreground galaxy and its halo of dark matter acts as a lens, distorting the image of a background galaxy along the line of sight towards Euclid.

With the help of these models, Euclid will capture some 7000 candidates in the major cosmology data release planned for the end of 2026, and in the order of 100 000 galaxy-galaxy strong lenses by the end of the mission, around 100 times more than currently known.]

#space #galaxy #astrophotography #photography #science #physics #nature #NASA #ESA

TOPIC>
Gravitational Lensing
https://defcon.social/@grobi/114374350096488478

The effect of gravitational lensing can probably also be achieved if you look deep into the glass. But if you look too deep into the glass, the effect seems to evaporate and you don't get to the hoped-for closer insights.. But sometimes it's just the way it is, who cares? Cheers!

Feel free to choose your personal application:

* Left Image:
Advanced User Application of Gravitational Lensing

* Right Image:
Far too advanced user Application of Gravitational Lensing

TOPIC>
Gravitational Lensing
https://defcon.social/@grobi/114374350096488478

#space #gravitational #photography #science #physics #nature #pets #cats #silentsunday #caturday #humor