The frequency of a photon will change by a factor of e when the photon traverses a gravitational potential difference of c^2. That is, f1/f0 = e^(ΔGP/c^2). If we observed light from the sun at an infinite distance (so that our GP is 0), the change in frequency would be a factor of e^((-GM/r)/(c^2)) = 0.999999783 (where M and r are the mass and radius of the sun).

@Messier #17 – wasn’t that the Blue Flame (Gary Gabelich, 1973)? Blue Streak was the abortive British ICBM project.

Oops. Of course! Yes, that’s the one I meant. Sorry. (Blushes.)

(Wiki-page now linked to my name here.)

@22. Puzzled Al : Not stupid questions at all. Matt (#23) is correct though I think. There is a gravitational redshift as well as the distance-light travel time one but if my possibly unreliable (example above) memory serves, it ‘s only noticeable for supermassive objects, eg. Galactic Black Holes.

@18. don gisselbeck : Indeed although I think the challenge is too much for them – ditto on why they’d listen to him about exoplanets, meteor showers & astrophysics more generally. Science works people. Everywhere.

Anyway, Mother Nature is full of wonderfull things. This is pretty cool!

Anyone else know?

@8. Acronym Jim :

Ah, so maybe the main “easter egg” in Holbein’s painting, “The Ambassadors” wasn’t an anamorph. It was just warped by the gravity produced by the apparently massive egos of the titular subjects.

LOL. Interesting, neat, painting. Cheers.

@4. Scott P. :

I seem to see a second distorted galaxy — just left of center, about a third of the way up. Anyone else see it?

Not sure. I see a few blue streaks+ which may or may not be part of the same untangled lensed galaxy we’re already discussing and what looks like a distorted and very blue barred spiral directly in line above the brightest elliptical of the cluster. Is that the one you were meaning?

*****

+ Blue streaks NOT meaning the eponymous historic world land speed record setting rocket car!

With very few exceptions, there will be no dispersion. The light follows a (null) geodesic through space-time, and since that is an inherent property of space, any light must follow the same path. Of course, intervening matter along the path (not the matter that is bending the light – that is somewhere else, in the cluster of galaxies) would affect the propagation a little bit; it is safe to assume there isn’t much matter along the geodesics.

@13. Sili : “How much mass in the lens?”

Could be mistaken but I’d say the mass of the cluster – galaxy cluster RCS2 032727-132623 – however much that is.

You are right. The galaxy is (more or less) exactly behind the cluster. However, the cluster is much brighter than the background galaxy (its twice as far away as the cluster) and therefore invisible. The arcs are amplified a lot, as Phil explained, by the lens.

In any event, lensed galaxies like these should definitely be put on a supernova watch, if only because of the magnification of the light that will make detailed spectral studies of the progress of the supernova much easier to make.

But on a scientific level, I wonder if there could be such a thing as a sophisticated, lens distortion deciphering program, based on a considerable back catalog of optical knowledge. Rather than stitch together fragmentary portions of the image, could such a computer program reconstruct images by reversing the distortions of the actual visual data?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambassadors_(Holbein)

True (and thanks–your idea didn’t occur to me), but considering the space-time scale involved the delay between some of the gravity-lensed images is probably more in terms of thousands or even (tens of?) millions of years.

Fantastic picture, BA!

As a road dips and turns, you have to make the car turn to follow it.

Perhaps a bicycle in a velodrome is a better analogy. Or a motorbike on a Wall of Death.

I’m guessing that the different lensing paths are different lengths, so we can watch that galaxy over 3 or more different time windows for the price of one observation.

Of course, the downside is the distortion.

Actually, couldn’t radio telescopes time some pulsars in the different reflections and figure out the length differences of the lensing paths from the pulsar timing differences?

http://www.stonemakerargument.com/4.html

Although, I don’t think Sam’s journey was nearly as exciting as this one.