“Mass tells spacetime how to bend, and spacetime tells mass how to move,” American physicist pioneer John Wheeler (1911-2008) once said. Wheeler was commenting on an Albert Einstein result Theory of general relativity (1915), who describes how spacetime can bend like the flexible fabric of a trampoline when a heavy object is placed on it. According to General relativity, The gravitational force can be explained by the deformation that a massive object causes in the space around it, and this deformation of space-time can result in strange shapes distorted in a way that has been compared to a “fun house” mirror. at a carnival. In October 2019, astronomers released an image of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) revealing a galaxy nicknamed the “Arc of sunbeams” which has been divided into a strange and charming kaleidoscopic illusion of a dozen images created by a huge cluster of foreground galaxies located 4.6 billion light-years away. This image beautifully demonstrates Einstein’s prediction that the gravity of massive objects in space should bend the traveling light, thus causing some very strange distortions.
Imagine a child’s stepping stone. A girl takes a bowling ball and places it on the flexible fabric of the trampoline. Then his brother takes a handful of marbles and tosses them near where the bowling ball rests on the cloth. The marbles travel around the dimple created in the trampoline fabric by the heavy bowling ball. If the bowling ball is removed, the marbles travel straight paths. The mass of the heavy bowling ball created a deformation – a curvature – in the trampoline fabric that “told” the marbles how to move. The trampoline fabric is Spacetime.
Einstein’s view of spacetime warping was tested in 1919 by observations of a solar eclipse where the curvature of the Sun (the bowling ball) from Space (the trampoline cloth) could be measured. An additional prediction was that the deformation would create a gravitational lens that, in addition to distortion, it would enlarge the apparent size and brightness of a distant object, behaving like a magnifying glass, much to the delight of astronomers who find such distortions valuable when observing distant objects in the Universe.
Mother nature magnifying glass
The term gravitational lens in itself it refers to the path that the traveling light has taken when it has deviated. This happens when the mass of an object in the foreground deforms the light coming out of a more remote object in the background. The light does not have to be visible light. It can be any form of electromagnetic radiation. Due to the effects of gravitational lens, the light beams that would not normally have been observable are deformed in such a way that their trajectories deviate towards the observer. However, light can also be deformed so that its rays travel far of the observer.
There are three different ways to gravitational lenses: strong lenses, weak lenses, and microlenses. The differences between the three types depend on the position of the background object that sends its rays of light into space, the foreground object that serves as lens deforming that light, and the position of the observer. Also, the shape and mass of the foreground lens itself plays an important role. This foreground object is what determines how much light from the background object will be deflected, as well as the path this light will take through space-time.
The Universe we see today is glowing brightly with the raging and fabulous fireworks of billions and billions of stars. The bright stellar inhabitants of the Universe populate the billions of galaxies that inhabit the relatively small expanse of spacetime that we call the visible gold observable Universe. Observers are unable to see what may exist beyond the cosmological horizon (edge) of the visible Universe. This is because the light emitted by bright objects that inhabit these unimaginably remote regions has not had enough time to reach us since the birth of the Big Bang Universe nearly 14 billion years ago. The expansion of the Universe and the finite speed of light have made such a journey impossible.
The speed of light establishes a kind of universal speed limit: no known sign can travel faster than light in a vacuum. We cannot see what may exist beyond the cosmological horizon, and the greatest of all mysteries, the unanswered secret of our own existence, may reside in those very remote realms far beyond our visibility. When we look deep into space, we look back in time. The more distant a luminous object is in space, the longer it takes for its light to reach us. It is impossible to locate an object in space, without also locating it in time (Space weather). The three spatial dimensions that characterize our familiar world are up and down, back and forth, and side to side. Time is the fourth dimension.
Gravitational lenses can dramatically magnify distant sources in the ancient Universe, yew there is a massive enough object lurking in the foreground that it sits between the background fountain and the prying eyes of curious observers.
It was not until 1979 that the first gravitational lens it was confirmed. An otherwise dark galaxy served as a lens and divided and magnified the light of a remote control quasar located far behind him in a duo of images. Gravitational lens Today’s observations are frequently used to discover new exoplanets orbiting stars beyond our Sun. Astronomers zoom in on very remote galaxies and then map the distribution of what would otherwise be transparent and invisible. dark matter.
Dark matter It is believed to be an exotic form of matter that is made up of non-atomic particles, which do not interact with light, making it invisible. It is believed to be the most abundant form of matter in the Universe, far more abundant than the “ordinary” atomic matter that makes up our familiar world. Because dark matter it is transparent – it does not interact with visible objects except through the force of gravity – its existence has not been directly verified. It is believed to play the important role of the gravitational “glue” that holds galaxies together, and its gravitational effects on objects that can be observed indicate that it likely lurks like a ghost in the Cosmos.
Glasses in the sky
Gravitational lens reveals that the foreground galaxy cluster magnifies Sunburst Bow It is so extremely massive that its powerful gravity warps the fabric of space-time, bending and magnifying the light emitted by it. Sunburst Bow located far behind him. This distortion effect also creates multiple images of the same galaxy.
Tea Sunburst Bow is located almost 11 billion light-years from our planet, and has been lens in multiple images by the massive foreground galaxy cluster found between the Sunburst Bow and earth. Tea lens The phenomenon created at least a dozen images of this remote background galaxy, distributed in a quartet of main arcs. Three of these arches can be seen in the upper right of the HST image, while a counter arc is in the lower left. However, the opposing arc is partially obscured by a very bright foreground star in our own Milky Way.
HST uses these gravitational magnifying glasses in spacetime to study objects that would otherwise be too faint, too distant, and too small for even the most sensitive instruments to detect. Tea Sunburst Bow, although it is one of the brightest gravitational lens galaxies, is no exception. Without the foreground lens magnifying and distorting its distant light, it would be too faint for astronomers to detect.
Tea lens created images of the Sunburst Bow are 10 to 30 times brighter than this background galaxy would be without the effects of gravitational lens. Expansion enabled HST look at structures as small as 520 light years in diameter that would otherwise be too tiny to be seen without Mother Nature’s gift of a lens. The structures resemble star birth regions in nearby galaxies in the local Universe. This helped astronomers conduct a detailed study of the remote galaxy and its surroundings.
HST observations reveal that the Sunburst Bow it is very similar to galaxies that existed much earlier in the history of the Universe, perhaps as little as 150 million years after the Big Bang.