Space through the lens of Carosello

The circular lens, as seen through the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: William Shaw/UCLA

In a rare and unusual discovery, a group of researchers has identified a unique composition of galaxies that represent the universe. Gravitational lens More harmonious than ever. Call her. circular It will allow us to delve deeper into the mysteries of the universe, including: material andDark energy.

Light emitted from distant objects when it passes through them Spacetime And distorted by closer galaxies or galaxy clusters, they can be magnified and bent. In rare cases, objects (to us, who are observing them) line up almost perfectly to form what is called Strong Gravitational Lens.

Thanks to the abundance New data Coming from Dark Energy Spectrometer (Desi) Old imaging surveys, recent observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Perlmutter supercomputer at National Center for Energy Research and Scientific Computing (NERSC), the researchers relied on previous studies (May 2020 to February 2021) to identify potential candidates for strong gravitational lenses.

“Our team looked for powerful lenses and designed the best systems,” he explains. Xiao Sheng Huangco-author of the study and member of the Supernova Cosmology Project The follower berkeley labas well as a professor of physics and astronomy atUniversity of San Francisco“The Carosello lens is an amazing alignment. Seven galaxies into five groups that align almost perfectly behind the lens.block in frontWhen viewed through the lens, multiple images of each background galaxy form roughly concentric circular patterns around the foreground lens, like a carousel. It’s an unprecedented discovery, and the resulting computational model shows great promise for measuring properties of the universe, including the properties of dark matter and dark energy.

“This is an incredibly lucky ‘galactic alignment’: a random alignment of multiple galaxies in a line of sight spanning most of the observable universe,” he says. David Schlegel“Finding one of these alliances is like finding a needle in a haystack,” said co-author of the Berkeley Lab study. “Finding them all is like finding eight needles neatly placed inside that haystack.”

The circular lens consists of a group of foreground galaxies (the lens) and seven background galaxies spanning vast cosmic distances and seen through the gravitationally distorted spacetime around the lens. You can see it in the image below, where you can also find labels indicating the different galaxies.

Hubble Space Telescope image of the circular lens, taken in two 10-minute exposures, one with an optical filter and one with an infrared filter. The “L” marks near the center (La, Lb, Lc, and Ld) indicate the most massive galaxies in the cluster, located 5 billion light-years away. Seven galaxies (numbered 1 to 7)—located between 2.6 and 7 billion light-years from the lens—are shown in multiple, distorted iterations (indicated by the letter index for each number, such as “a” through “d”), viewed through the lens. Credits: William Shaw (UCLA), HIST

The lens cluster, which is 5 billion light-years from Earth, is represented by the four brightest and most massive galaxies (labeled La, Lb, Lc and Ld), which form the foreground of the image. Visible through the lens (numbered 1 to 7) are seven galaxies located much further away, at distances ranging from 7.6 to 12 billion light-years from Earth.

The repeated appearance of each galaxy (indicated by the letter next to each number, such as “a” through “d”) shows variations in its shape, as it bends and stretches as if reflected in those fun distorting mirrors found at a carnival, caused in this case by the distortion of space-time around the lens.

If you look carefully and look at different images of the same galaxy, you will see that there is one in particular – number 4, with multiple appearances 4a, 4b, 4c and 4d – which forms Einstein’s Cross – The largest known to date. This rare pattern of multiple images around the center of the lens is an indication of the symmetric distribution of the lens’s mass (dominated by invisible dark matter) and plays a key role in the lens modeling process.

The circular lens will allow researchers to study dark energy and dark matter in entirely new ways, thanks to the power of observational data and computational modeling. “It’s a very unusual alignment, which in itself will provide a test bed for cosmological studies,” he adds. Natalie Palanque Delabroe“It also shows how DICE imaging can be exploited for other scientific applications,” such as investigating the mysteries of dark matter and the accelerating expansion of the universe, driven by dark energy, said Dr.

Read more:

• Continue reading Astrophysical Journal The article “Carousel Lens: A powerful, well-designed lens with multiple sources confirmed spectroscopically by VLT/MUSEBy William Shiu, Alexander Sekota, Xiaoxing Huang, Karl Glazebrook, Christopher Storfer, Shrihan Agarwal, David J. Schlegel, Nao Suzuki, Tanya M. Baron, Fuyan Bian, Tesla Gjeltema, Tucker Jones, Glenn J. O’Donnell and Keerthi Vasan J.C.