Hubble Telescope Discovers a Light-Bending 'Einstein Ring' in Space

https://www.space.com/40255-hubble-telescope-einstein-ring-photo.html

by katiey • 8 years ago

239 57 8 years ago

sp3322• 8 years ago

I'm getting cross-domain errors on the images on this page. The main one of the ring has this URL https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1... and if you base64-decode the last part you get http://www.space.com/images/i/000/075/580/original/hubble-te...

Here's the first video https://videos-f.jwpsrv.com/content/conversions/xTYS7F8k/vid...

Second video https://videos-f.jwpsrv.com/content/conversions/xTYS7F8k/vid...

sp3322• 8 years ago

Edit: The cache tokens have expired so the video links don't work anymore, but the site seems to be working better now.

jacquesm• 8 years ago

Either that or a very large marble. Amazing picture.

Groxx• 8 years ago

They're quite neat, but haven't we had pictures of these for quite a while? Is there something new about this one, or is it ("just") an article reminding people that cool stuff still exists?

Sharlin2• 8 years ago

Yep, and the article pretty much admits that in the second half. The featured picture itself is years old. Title is pure clickbait.

soared2• 8 years ago

Its not clickbait - the article says we know about less than 12 Einstein rings. So finding 1 occurence of something we've only seen 12 of seems significant.

batbomb• 8 years ago

Yes, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Horseshoe

InclinedPlane2• 8 years ago

Yes, the article is distinctly missing the word "another".

ganzuul• 8 years ago

Maybe reminding people that Hubble is still alive, and still doing science.

HugoDaniel• 8 years ago

Does this mean time travel is possible ?

gpvos• 8 years ago

No, not at all. Why would you think that?

Simon_says2• 8 years ago

Time travel is possible so long as you’re not particular about which direction.

pbhjpbhj• 8 years ago

Nor too bothered about the speed.

elohhim2• 8 years ago

I think that this one answers the question pretty good: https://xkcd.com/209/

thr0000waay2• 8 years ago

why none of these articles mention non-desarguian geometry?

krastanov• 8 years ago

Why would a popular science article mention a very technical term that does not provide any additional insight?

ugh123• 8 years ago

Enlighten us with what that means and perhaps we'll be able to tell you why its not in the article...

thr0000waay2• 8 years ago

Most common axiomatic geometry is Desarguian. Its projective.

https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Desargues_assum...

When light is bent while passing by a huge mass, this axiom fails so does the geometry.

_bxg1• 8 years ago

According to comments here we've apparently taken pictures of these before, but I didn't know that and it's amazing seeing an actual photo of something so dramatic.

hydandata• 8 years ago

This is lame in comparison with the cosmic smiley face: https://www.space.com/28512-cosmic-smiley-face-hubble-photo....

sizzzzlerz• 8 years ago

Is there an active survey underway to find other examples or do they stumble across one when reviewing images acquired earlier for completely different purposes? Are there automated scanners that can search or is it by human observation?

InclinedPlane2• 8 years ago

Yes actually, sort of. Gravitational lensing of remote galaxies is one of the core techniques for mapping the 3D distribution of mass in nearer galaxies and galaxy clusters, which makes it a fantastic tool for studying dark matter. Occasionally they find these Einstein rings as well.

jermaustin1• 8 years ago

It seems like these would be more prevalent, at least partial "rings". With how large space is, I'd assume there has to be something SUPER bright behind tons SUPER massive objects/clusters/whatever.

I guess we just aren't always lined up with them?

BurningFrog2• 8 years ago

Also, we haven't looked everywhere yet.

stareatgoats9• 8 years ago

Quite OT, but these phenomena always reminds me of how wrong (popular understanding of) Einstein actually is. Whereas gravity according to that understanding warps the fabric of space itself, these pictures prove that gravity actually only appears to warp space.

I.e. our intuitive, euclidean concept of space is actually the most correct, albeit an abstract, inferred phenomenon.

MereInterest• 8 years ago

I'd be interested to hear how you came to that conclusion, as these pictures show the complete opposite to me. In a vacuum, light takes the shortest distance between two points. That light is bent by gravity shows that gravity is changing what it means to be the "shortest distance". That is, space itself is being warped by the presence of mass.

stareatgoats9• 8 years ago

Sure, maybe this explains better: The picture shows how light from a galaxy or galaxies from behind the galaxy cluster SDSS J0146-0929 are bent around it. It makes it "seem as though the galaxy is in several places at once".

The key word is "seem", which means that the light-bending characteristic of gravity make space seem like something it is not. Hope this helps.

smsx• 8 years ago

What made you come to this conclusion?

stareatgoats9• 8 years ago

Tough one to answer since I believe I already explained the reasoning in the comment. I'll be happy to play if you think something is unclear there. The only rule is; you need to say what you think of this yourself.

kowdermeister2• 8 years ago

No, this phenomenon actually proves that space really is warped, otherwise you wouldn't see the light from behind a galaxy cluster because light follows a straight line.

stareatgoats9• 8 years ago

Even the concept of 'warped' space itself indicates that the intuitive, euclidean concept is correct, the light does in fact not travel in a straight line, it follows a 'warped' line.

The difference between the two is that the 'warped' space is what we observe (because observing is an electromagnetic process, subject to gravity), 'real' space is something we can only infer (or observe in photos like in the linked article)

downer59• 8 years ago

No, it proves that the path of the visible photons we're detecting have been altered by forces of attraction.

resource0x3• 8 years ago

We certainly need the concept of Euclidean space in order to make sense of the phrase "warped space". Fortunately, our "everyday" space is almost Euclidean, so this condition is met. If we lived in a different place in Universe, not sure what our concepts could have been. But I think same applies to just any concept we derive from our observations. E.g., we would never be able to form a notion of ice if we lived near some star. But I can't see how your statement about "real" vs "apparent" follows from here.

stareatgoats9• 8 years ago

"Real" vs "apparent" simply follows from what we can infer from the picture, i.e. the galaxies appear to be several because of the light-warping effect of gravity, in reality they are not.

Further, I don't think space (or time for that matter) are comparable to the notion of ice, but let's keep it simple for now :-)

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

One ( SDSSJ0146-0929) of 37 objects in a program to image strong lensing fields with Hubble.

http://www.stsci.edu/hst/phase2-public/13003.pro

"The fundamental unit of star formation in the Universe is neither a star, nor a galaxy, but a star forming region with a typical scale of at most 100s of parsecs."

More interesting stuff at: http://www.stsci.edu/

LargeWu2• 8 years ago

It never, ever ceases to amaze me how right Einstein was without the ability to test his hypotheses. At the time it was all groundbreaking theoretical work yet it mostly holds up to empirical studies.

auxbuss• 8 years ago

Einstein was the first to truly grasp James Clerk Maxwell's work. If Maxwell hadn't died in 1879 at only 48, then I like to imagine he would have produced Special Relativity – most of it is there in his famous equations.

Einstein also had the benefit of knowing the null result of the Michelson–Morley experiment (1887), and Hertz's experimental confirmation of electromagnetic waves moving at the speed of light (1889) predicted by Maxwell.

Einstein, of course, explicitly recognised Maxwell and kept a picture of him on his office wall.

While Einstein's theoretical work is fabulous, it was Maxwell who first broke away from the mechanical model; something that even his illustrious contemporaries struggled to understand.

If you appreciate Einstein, yet know little of Maxwell, then The Man Who Changed Everything[0] is a great introduction.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29442.The_Man_Who_Change...

LargeWu2• 8 years ago

Thanks for that, I wasn't aware of Maxwell, I'll have to do some reading.

candiodari• 8 years ago

In a way, that's pretty disappointing. Einstein's general theory of relativity is a theory that essentially only describes gravity. The standard model describes everything but gravity.

And there is zero common ground between them. The standard model says, in a way, that gravity cannot exist (because gravitons are impossible, nothing in the standard model could carry the gravity force), and the special theory of relativity says nothing about anything other than gravity and spacetime. Or we should say, it describes spacetime, but not what's in it.

And yet there are ridiculously obvious empirical links between both of them. There's many, such as the famous e=mc2 equation, or the speed of light that can be measured in both theories using vastly different theoretical underpinnings, yielding the same value. And yet, theory says they have nothing to do with eachother. The speed of light could very well be very different, it would not be a problem, so why does it match ?

But my favorite is that inertia only exists in the standard model. Gravitic attraction only exists in relativity. But they are determined by the same property. We know that to a factor of about 1e-50 there is no difference between inertial mass and gravitic mass ... and yet all our theories say that there is no link whatsoever between them, that that's just another amazing coincidence.

And half of the physics of the 20th century can be described as "ah ! problem with relativity. Oh wait no. But ! Problem found ! Nope. Found it ! No. Here there might be a flaw in relativity and that would explain all these ... nope, no flaw".

In many ways, if we had found a huge problem with general relativity, we could have been much further in our understanding of the universe than we are now.

0xfaded• 8 years ago

Is there standard software which is run on satellite images to detect these and other phenomena?

elohhim2• 8 years ago

Have you seen comments on this article on the original site? What is wrong with those people?

maze-le• 8 years ago

Well, I've seen worse, at least no one gets threatened. But it doesn't suprise me one bit. About 6 years ago I started to abandon comment sections altogether, because every second poster or so had some agenda politically, religiously or some esoteric nuthouse BS. This directly affects the quality of the other (genuineley interested) postings, because they started to argue with the trolls and shills. What once were intersting fora of conversation became snake pits. Not everywhere, but to a significant degree.

Hubble Telescope Discovers a Light-Bending 'Einstein Ring' in Space

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