Sometimes, I like to think of a photon of light as a car on a road. As the road dips and curves, a car has to follow that path, dipping and curving as well. It might be weird to think of space as curving, but it does. Gravity from massive objects warps space, and a beam of light moving through that curved space curves along with it.

This is the principle behind what’s called gravitational lensing. A beam of light passing by an object — a big galaxy, say, or a cluster of galaxies — bends one way. A beam headed in a slightly different direction bends a slightly different way. This can really mess with what we see… which I can prove! Check this out: a Hubble image of the galaxy RCSGA 032727-13260.

What a mess! All those arcs and blue smudges are images of that one galaxy. The light from that galaxy traveled nearly 10 billion light years to get here! But when it was halfway here, that light passed by the big cluster of galaxies — the red fuzzballs — in the middle of the image. As it did, the curvature of space distorted and warped the light from the galaxy, and by the time it reached us here at Earth the image looks like this. The outstretched, smeared-out arc is amazing; I’ve never seen one that long and well-defined before.

Not only that, but the image gets broken up into several separate images. There are no fewer than four different repetitions of the background galaxy in the big image. To show that, I put three of them together here. It’s goofed up, to be sure, but you can kinda sorta see they are the same galaxy, flipped over and/or smudged out.

The cool thing about this is we can learn about the more distant galaxy by examining these images. (more…)

I have nothing to add to this, except to say it’s great, and I saw it because Brian Cox mentioned it on Twitter.

Oh yeah: one more thing; watch it in HD and full screen. Coooool.

[I'm trying to catch up with all the news that's been released this week while I was off lecturing in Texas. This is Part 2 of a few articles just about exoplanets. Here's Part 1, and here's Part 2.]

A very interesting set of observations has resulted in a conclusion that is somehow, paradoxically, both expected and startling: there are hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy alone!

It’s expected because all the research being done for the past few years has been zeroing in on how many stars have planets, and it’s looking more and more like they’re very common. I’ll get into that in a sec. But it’s also startling, because HOLY COW THERE MAY BE HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF PLANETS IN OUR GALAXY ALONE!

Ahem. OK. So what’s going on here?

The new result comes from what’s called microlensing. The gravity of a star or planet can bend the light coming from an even more distant star, briefly magnifying it. The way the star light gets brighter over time can reveal the mass of the object doing the magnifying — the "lens", as it were. If a star passes in front of another star, you get a rise and then fall in the brightness, but if a planet is orbiting that nearer star, you get a second, smaller bump as well.

This kind of event takes an extraordinarily precise alignment, so they’re extremely rare. To compensate, you need to look at a lot of stars. So astronomers did: a survey using two telescopes covered several million stars every night, looking for the tell-tale bump(s). Over the course of six years, they found three — yes, only three — planets orbiting other stars acting like wee distant lenses. But that number is actually pretty good: when combined with previous surveys, and also taking into account how many lenses they didn’t see (which is important, statistically), they can extrapolate with some confidence about the numbers and types of exoplanets out there.

Their most basic result, and the one causing the stir, is that they find that there are likely hundreds of billions of planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy alone. Given that there are a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, this means on average there are about one or two planets per star in our galaxy! Now, let me be clear: this is an average. I’ve seen reports saying every star in our galaxy has a planet, and that’s not necessarily the case. You could have one star, say, with ten planets, and then nine with none and get the same results here.

The results get even more interesting when you break them down by planet type. (more…)

There are quite a few mysteries in astronomy; things we don’t understand. The vast majority of them are smallish in scope, things that can probably be solved with a little more work, more observations. These are more like questions than outright mysteries; things we just don’t have the answers to quite yet.

But then there are some that really are mysteries: unexpected oddities that, for now, defy explanation. One of these reared its head again recently, when observations by the ground-based Subaru and Keck observatories were combined with those from the space-based telescopes Hubble and Spitzer. It doesn’t look like much of a mystery — just a red smudge — but it pushes the boundaries of what we think the very Universe itself can do.

[Click to enbigbangenate.]

First, holy cow, what an image! Incredibly, nearly every single object in that picture is an entire galaxy, a vast collection of billions of stars. They’re also very distant; I doubt any of the bigger ones are closer than several billion light years away.

And lurking off to the side, where you’d hardly notice it, is that little red guy. Named GN-108036, it’s at the soul-crushing distance of 12.9 billion light years away. That means that the light we see here left that galaxy when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old.

As you might imagine, it may look faint, but at that distance it’s remarkable we can see it at all. But we do, because it’s amazingly luminous, perhaps the most intrinsically bright galaxy seen at that distance ever found. Of course, we don’t see too many galaxies farther away than this! And that’s part of the mystery.

(more…)

Spiral galaxies are among the most beautiful objects in the sky, and one of the most beautiful of them is M101, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy. It’s a reliable favorite among amateur astronomers because it’s big, bright, and located near the north pole of the sky, so it’s easy to find for a big part of the year.

I’ve seen it many times through a telescope, but not quite like the way NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) saw it: glowing fiercely in colors our eyes cannot detect:

[Click to galactinate.]

This image shows the galaxy in the far-infrared. What you see here as blue is actually starlight; green is from long organic compounds called PAHs, and red is from glowing dust, warmed by nearby star formation. Look at the gigantic red clouds where stars are being born! Thousands of these have been catalogued in the Pinwheel.

It’s actually an immense galaxy, twice the diameter of the Milky Way and possessing as many as ten times the number of stars. Our galaxy is no lightweight, but the Pinwheel is a monster. I wrote about it when Hubble released a gorgeous and incredibly detailed image of it back in 2006. There’s also a spectacular Spitzer image of it as well, which is also in the infrared, though in a different part of the IR spectrum.

The WISE mission shut its eye earlier this year when it ran out of coolant to keep its detectors cold (warm objects emit lots of IR, so keeping things cold prevents the detectors themselves from glowing in the very light they’re designed to see), but it surveyed the entire sky, returning a whole lot of data. I imagine we’ll be seeing more pictures like this coming from the database, as well as lots of amazing discoveries as scientists pore over it. The mission itself may be done, but the information it gave us goes on.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA