In July 2022, it was released James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – The most powerful telescope humanity has ever put into space – She handed her first picture, a deep-field image containing thousands of galaxies, many of which are seen as they were in the early universe. What many people didn’t expect was how some of these twisted and strange galaxies would turn out.
Salvador Dali’s galaxies that look like melted candy aren’t representative of what these objects look like in space; It is an illusion in JWST images. Another amazing aspect of JWST images, such as One taken from the RX J2129 supercluster, It is that several galaxies appear at multiple points in the same image. Again, this is an illusion. These galaxies don’t actually have doppelgängers exactly.
How is this possible? These two distinct aspects of the JWST images are the result of the same phenomenon, called gravitational lensing. Predicted for the first time over 100 years ago by Albert EinsteinGravitational lensing has become an important tool for astronomers through the work ofmagnifying glass. These distorted, repeating galaxies are all examples of gravitationally lensed objects.
Related: James Webb Space Telescope images: 12 stunning views of our universe (gallery)
What is gravitational lens?
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Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s theory general relativitywhich suggests that gravity It emerges from the effect of bodies with mass on the fabric of space and time, uniting as a single entity called spacetime.
Think of a stretchy rubber board with balls of different masses placed on it. The greater the ball’s mass, the more it wraps around the rubber sheet. The same is true for objects with a lot of mass found in the fabric of space-time: the greater the mass, the more the space-time object is warped, by things like galaxies and galaxy clusters that cause severe distortion of space-time. This effect gets really interesting when light from a background object, like a star or galaxy, goes through this warp.
Related: James Webb Space Telescope observes cosmic seahorses through gravitational lensing (photo)
Light travels in straight lines, regardless of whether the space through which it passes is distorted. Warping space with mass causes the light coming from a distant source to “bend”. As a result, when the light hits Landit makes the background object appear to be in a different place in the sky.
In extreme warping situations, when the object between the Earth and the background source is massive, the light takes different paths around the object, all of them curved to varying degrees. This changes the length of the path the light takes to reach us to varying degrees, and thus its arrival time. This means that the lensed object can appear at multiple points in a single exposure. This can give rise to some interesting shapes, such as crosses, or, in the case of a lens with perfect symmetry, a ring of light called an “Einstein ring,” all made up of repeated iterations of the same object.
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Galaxy clusters have a “messy” shape, with the clusters lacking a central distribution, so when they act as intermediate or lensing objects, the lensing is not perfect, According to the European Space Agency (Opens in a new tab). This causes the lensed object to appear distorted as arcs around the lenticular galaxy cluster, as seen in JWST’s deep field image.
However, these lenticular objects are more than just a visual curiosity. Gravitational lensing can be useful to astronomers in several ways.
Not only does gravitational lensing distort light from a background object; It can actually amplify this light, thus enhancing the very faint light from extremely distant objects, such as early galaxies. As a result, gravitational lensing is vital to the investigation of the early universe by JWST.
In addition, the patterns that lenticular objects create as light passes can reveal a lot about that object, NASA explains (Opens in a new tab). For example, gravitational lensing can reveal how matter is distributed in galaxy clusters and galaxies.
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Additional sources
Explore gravitational lensing in more detail with this Resources from NASA (Opens in a new tab). The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has also produced a helpful video demonstration of gravitational lensing Fermilab YouTube channel (Opens in a new tab).
index
Kelly, b. (2023, February 28). Triple vision. ESA/Webb, NASA, and CSA. https://esawebb.org/images/potm2302a/ (Opens in a new tab)
NASA. (2022, September 30). gravitational lens. Hubble Site. https://hubblesite.org/contents/articles/gravitational-lensing#:~:text (Opens in a new tab)
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