Latest Gravitational lensing Stories

Thanks to the presence of a natural "zoom lens" in space, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope got a uniquely close-up look at the brightest "magnified" galaxy yet discovered. This observation provides a unique opportunity to study the physical properties of a galaxy vigorously forming stars when the universe was only one-third its present age. A so-called gravitational lens is produced when space is warped by a massive foreground object, whether it is the sun, a black hole or an entire...

An astronomer has discovered a faint "satellite galaxy" that is the lowest-mass object ever detected 10 billion light years away. Finding this dwarf galaxy at such a long distance away may be able to help astronomers find similar objects and confirm or reject theories about the structure of the universe. University of California physics professor Chris Fassnacht said in a statement that theory predicts that galaxies should be surrounded by halos of smaller, satellite blobs of mass....

[ Watch the Video ] Planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception An international team, including three astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has used the technique of gravitational microlensing to measure how common planets are in the Milky Way. After a six-year search that surveyed millions of stars, the team concludes that planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception. The results will appear in the journal Nature on 12 January 2012....

A UC Davis graduate student who is leading a study of the collision of galaxy clusters 5 billion light years away discussed the team’s findings today, Jan. 10, in a press briefing at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. “A galaxy cluster is like a little universe, because it has the same matter composition as the whole universe,” said William Dawson, a Ph.D. candidate in physics. “By studying this little universe, we can learn more about our...

Even the most powerful high-tech telescopes are barely able to record remote low-mass and thus faint stars. Together with researchers from Poland and Chile, an astrophysicist from the University of Zurich has now detected a low-mass star in globular cluster M22 for the first time through microlensing. The result indicates that the overall mass of globular clusters might well be explained without enigmatic dark matter. Until now, it was merely assumed that low-mass and therefore extremely...

[ Watch the Video ] A team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc — a brightly glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy’s central black hole. Their study makes use of a novel technique that uses gravitational lensing to give an immense boost to the power of the telescope. The incredible precision of the method has allowed astronomers to directly measure the disc’s size and plot the temperature across...

[ Watch Video 1 ] | [ Watch Video 2 ] The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been used to make an image of galaxy cluster MACS J1206.2-0847. The apparently distorted shapes of distant galaxies in the background is caused by an invisible substance called dark matter, whose gravity bends and distorts their light rays. MACS 1206 has been observed as part of a new survey of galaxy clusters using Hubble. Cluster MACS J1206.2-0847 (or MACS 1206 for short) is one of the first targets in a...

Gravitational Lensing by Clusters of GalaxiesYet another independent line of evidence points to the dominance of dark matter in galaxy clusters. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, space is curved in the vicinity of strong gravitational fields.One consequence of the warping of space by gravity is that the path of light from background galaxies is bent when it passes near a cluster, in much the same way that a glass lens will bend light. The images of the galaxies are...

WASHINGTON, May 18, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers, including a NASA-funded team member, have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds probably were ejected from developing planetary systems. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The discovery is based on a joint Japan-New Zealand survey that scanned the center of the Milky Way galaxy during...

Astronomers who survey galaxies in the distant universe are getting some unexpected help from gravity, according to a new study.In a presentation at the American Astronomical Society meeting this week and a related paper in the current issue of the journal Nature, researchers say that as many as 20 percent of the most distant galaxies currently detected appear brighter than they actually are, because of an effect called "strong gravitational lensing."The discovery could change...