Cosmic Lens Reveals Distant Galactic Violence

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Oct. 21, 2008) — By cleverly unraveling the workings of a natural cosmic lens, astronomers have gained a rare glimpse of the violent assembly of a young galaxy in the early Universe. Their new picture suggests that the galaxy has collided with another, feeding a supermassive black hole and triggering a tremendous burst of star formation.

The astronomers used the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope to look at a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years from Earth, seen as it was when the Universe was only about 15 percent of its current age. Between this galaxy and Earth lies another distant galaxy, so perfectly aligned along the line of sight that its gravity bends the light and radio waves from the farther object into a circle, or "Einstein Ring."

This gravitational lens made it possible for the scientists to learn details of the young, distant galaxy that would have been unobtainable otherwise.

"Nature provided us with a magnifying glass to peer into the workings of a nascent galaxy, providing an exciting look at the violent, messy process of building galaxies in the early history of the Universe," said Dominik Riechers, who led this project at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and now is a Hubble Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081020171450.htm


HOW THE DISTANT GALAXY WAS IMAGED: Radio waves from carbon monoxide gas in the distant galaxy
(left) were bent by the gravitational effect of another galaxy directly between the distant object and Earth (right).
The nearly-perfect alignment caused the distant object to appear as a ring when seen from Earth. This
graphic shows how the distant object would appear as one moves from Earth toward the lensing galaxy.
Some of the waves are Doppler shifted by the motions of the gas in the galaxy, and this is indicated by the colors.
Green indicates "stationary" gas; red indicates gas moving away from us, and blue indicates gas moving toward us
with respect to the rest of the galaxy.

CREDIT: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF



ANIMATION of above: View that an observer would see as they move from Earth to the lensing galaxy.
Once arriving at the lensing galaxy, the lensing would disappear, showing an undistorted image of the distant galaxy.
CREDIT: Dominik Riechers, Brendon Brewer



RECONSTRUCTED IMAGE of the distant galaxy, at left, and the "Einstein Ring" image seen from Earth, right.
Colors indicated Doppler-shifted radio emission from carbon monoxide (CO) gas , as explained above. 8.5 kpc equals
28 thousand light-years. The intermediate, lensing galaxy is not seen in this image, because its CO emission arrives
at Earth at radio frequencies outside the range of this observation.
CREDIT: Riechers et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF

[pleah]

1. K&R Amazing. n/t

[tridim]

2. It's stunning that the mysteries of the Universe are apparently solvable from..

any point within the Universe, by creatures made from the same materials that make up the Universe.

We are truly all one.