Epic Gravity Lens Lines Up Seven-Galaxy View

The epic gravity lens aligns the view of the seven galaxies

Who Tom Metcalf

That almost impossible alignment of galaxies it forms a giant magnifying glass it can give astronomers an unprecedentedly deep view of the universe.

The Carousel Lens—named for its concentric circular patterns, like the reflections of a funhouse mirror—encompasses a galaxy cluster five billion light-years from Earth whose gravity is so intense that it magnifies the light of seven galaxies behind it. 7.6 billion to 12 billion light years. This phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, only occurs when galaxies line up exactly in our view.

As seen from Earth, the massive gravitational lens produces multiple images of six of the seven background galaxies, whose light reaches us through a slightly different path. If a “transient” event, such as a supernova, occurs in one of these galaxies, astronomers here will have four views at slightly different times.

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“If we had a supernova exploding, we would have as many images of the source as the supernova,” says cosmologist Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, director of the physics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who participated in the discovery of the lens. “That would provide amazing information.”

Careful observations of the foreground cluster—itself may consist of hundreds of galaxies—and background galaxies can help astronomers better understand how dark matter and dark energy behave, as well as more about the universe’s ancient past. The farthest background galaxy is so far away that it must have developed at an early stage in the universe, which most scientists believe is about 13.7 billion years old.

The researchers used artificial intelligence systems to find potential gravitational lenses by sorting through millions of galactic survey images. The Hubble Space Telescope was then arranged to image the location, revealing the Carousel Lens in high resolution.

William Sheu, an astrophysics student at the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author of a new study on the discovery. in the year Astrophysical magazinesays that analysis of Hubble images may reveal more background galaxies that have been enhanced by the gravity of the same background galaxy cluster.

Gravitational lensing follows Einstein’s 1916 theory of general relativity, which predicted that gravity would bend light; The first such lens was discovered in 1979. Astronomer Tereasa Brainerd of Boston University, who was not involved in the discovery, says the lenses have become powerful tools for probing many of the cosmos’ open questions.

“This is a particularly remarkable object,” says Brainerd. “It’s just a stroke of luck that the lens and the seven background galaxies are almost perfectly aligned in our line of sight.”