Latest Weak gravitational lensing Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers at the Kavli IPMU, led by Robert Quimby, have discovered the first ever Type Ia supernova (SNIa), extraordinarily magnified by a gravitational lens. Scientists wrote in the Astrophysics Journal Letters they discovered the supernova, PS1-10afx, with the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System 1 (Pan-STARRS1). The supernova exploded over 9 billion years ago, making it a much further object than most studied...
Subaru Telescope In a course of studying young galaxies at a distance of 11.6 billion light years from Earth, a team of astronomers led by Professor Yoshiaki Taniguchi (Ehime University) noticed a strangely shaped galaxy that looks like a "magatama", an ancient, comma-shaped Japanese amulet made of stone. Subsequent research revealed that the magatama galaxy was actually an overlapping system of two young galaxies lying in an extremely close line of sight--an exceedingly rare occurrence...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online In order to illuminate the darkness we turn to the light. Whether the sun, a lamp, or a candle, we rely on electromagnetic radiation to reveal the world, and indeed the Universe, around us. Everything that we see - every tree, every planet, and every star - we see because it emits, reflects, bends and focuses light to our eyes. Without the interaction of matter with light, we are blind. But what about matter that does...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Approximately 8 billion years ago, the light from distant galaxies began streaming towards Earth. Now, at a mountaintop observatory in Chile, the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera (DECam), the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured that ancient starlight and recorded it for the first time. Early on September 12, 2012, the DECam, mounted atop the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online For the first time, scientists have detected part of the invisible dark matter skeleton of the universe, where over half of all matter is believed to reside. The discovery confirms a key prediction in the theory of how the universe's current web-like structure came to be. The map of the known universe shows that most galaxies are organized into clusters, but some are situated along filaments that connect to the clusters....
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com Astronomers were able to beat the odds by observing gravitational lensing taking place at 10 billion light-years away from Earth. Gravitational lensing is the bending of light from a distant galaxy, and it has never been observed behind a cluster at this range before. The giant arc is the stretched shape of a more distant galaxy whose light is distorted by the cluster's powerful gravity. Astronomers reported in the July 10 issue of The Astrophysical...
In space, it sometimes happens that two galaxies are aligned in just the right way that the closer galaxy distorts and magnifies the appearance of the one behind it. For astronomers, finding these alignments is like coming across giant, cosmic magnifying glasses. Now, a team of astronomers, including Daniel Stern from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has found several rare examples of this phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, in which the foreground galaxy hosts...
Two teams of astronomers have used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes to map the distribution of dark matter in a galaxy cluster known as Abell 383, which is located about 2.3 billion light years from Earth. Not only were the researchers able to find where the dark matter lies in the two dimensions across the sky, they were also able to determine how the dark matter is distributed along the line of sight. Dark matter is invisible material that does not emit or...
Two teams of astronomers have used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes to map the distribution of dark matter in a galaxy cluster known as Abell 383, which is located about 2.3 billion light years from Earth. Not only were the researchers able to find where the dark matter lies in the two dimensions across the sky, they were also able to determine how the dark matter is distributed along the line of sight. Dark matter is invisible material that does not emit...
The discovery of a dark matter mass left behind after what is being called a wreck between massive clusters of galaxies has experts questioning current theories regarding the invisible substance believed to make up more than 80% of the universe. According to a Friday press release from NASA, currently scientists theorize that galaxies should be anchored to dark matter, even in the event of a collision. However, astronomers using information gathered from the Hubble Telescope have...
Latest Weak gravitational lensing Reference Libraries
The Bullet Cluster is made up of two colliding clusters galaxies. According to a 2006 study, the Bullet Cluster also shows the best evidence for the existence of Dark Matter. From observations of galaxy cluster collisions it has been found that many show displacement between their center of visible matter and their gravitational potential. Each component, stars, gas, and dark matter, within a cluster pair behaves differently during a collision allowing for each to be studied separately....
Gravitational Lens -- A gravitational lens is formed when the light from a very distant, bright object (such as a quasar) is "bent" around a massive object (such as a massive galaxy) between the bright object and the viewer. The process is known as gravitational lensing, and was one of the predictions made by Einstein's general relativity. Description In a gravitational lens, the gravity from the massive object bends light as a lens might. As a result, the path of the light from a...
