The picture above shows a cosmic bulls-eye of epic alignment. But before I can tell you about it, I have to tell you about how the dart got thrown.

One of the more amazing aspects of looking into deep, deep space is that the path there is tortured and twisted. Space itself can be distorted by mass; it gets bent, like a road curves as it goes around a hill. And like a truck that must follow that road and steer around the hill, a photon must follow the curve of space.

Imagine a distant galaxy, billions of light years away. It emits light in all directions. One particular photon happens to be emitted almost — but not quite — in our direction. Left on its own, we’d never see it because it would miss the Earth by thousands or millions of light years.

But on its travels, it passes by another massive galaxy. This galaxy warps space, and the photon does what it must do: it follows that curve in pace, and changes direction… and it just so happens that the curve is just right to send it our way.

The intervening galaxy is essentially acting like a lens, bending the light. If the more distant galaxy is exactly behind the lensing galaxy, we see the light from that more distant galaxy distorted into a perfect ring, a circle of light surrounding the lens. We call this an Einstein Ring. If the farther galaxy is off to the side a bit, we see an arc instead of a complete ring. Gravitationally lensed arcs and rings are seen all over the sky, and they can be used to determine the mass of the intervening galaxy! The more mass, the more distorted the light from the farther galaxy. So the Universe has given us a nice method to let us weigh it.

In a surprising twist, astronomers have found a new type of lensed galaxy: a double ring! In a rare alignment, there are two distant galaxies aligned behind an intervening lensing galaxy. They’re like beads on a wire, lined up just right such that both more distant galaxies are lensed by the nearer one. In this case, the lens is about 3 billion light years away, and the other two are 6 and 11 billion light years away, an incredible distance.

This image is amazing, but it is also a powerful scientific tool. It allows us to measure not just the mass of the lensing galaxy, but also the amount of mysterious dark matter nearby. We cannot see the dark matter, but it too bends light, and contributes to the lensings. By observing lenses like this, we can take a sample of dark matter in the Universe, and that’s a crucial first step in understanding it. Even better, these double rings allows us to measure the amount of total mass not just in the nearest galaxy, as is usual, but also in the middle galaxy as well, since it distorts the light from the galaxy behind it (turns out it’s a rather lightweight one billion solar masses; our own Galaxy has more than 100 times that mass, so the middle galaxy is considered a dwarf).

This is a beautiful happenstance; it gives us a measure of the Universe at two points, with one being for free. In fact, Tommaso Treu, the astronomer at U.C. Santa Barbara who investigated this lens, points out that if we can find as few as 50 of these double rings, we can get a much better idea of the distribution of not just dark matter, but also the even more mysterious dark energy in the Universe. That’s one of the biggest goals of modern astronomy… and we may get a handle on it due to a coincidental ring toss.

M81 and M82 are bright nearby galaxies; you can spot them with binoculars easily in the northern sky, and they are a mere 12 million light years from us (for comparison, the Milky Way Galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so if you think of the Milky Way as a DVD, M81 and M82 would be about 14 meters away). These two galaxies interacted a couple of hundred million years ago, and the gravitational interaction drew out long tendrils of gas (which is very common in colliding galaxies).

Astronomers examined this bridge of material using Hubble, and found clusters of stars in it. That was totally unexpected; the gas was thought to be too thin to form stars! Amazingly, many of the stars are blue, indicating they are young (blue stars burn through their fuel much more quickly than redder stars. This means that the gas is still forming stars, even 200 million years after the collision!

In the image below, almost all the stars you see are young blue stars formed in the aftermath of that titanic collision. The reddish stars are stars in our galaxy, and the bigger objects are distant background galaxies.

Most likely, the stars formed when turbulence in the tendril caused local regions of denser gas, which could collapse to form stars. Before these observations, it wasn’t really thought it was possible to form stars in the regions between galaxies, so this is an interesting new find.

Richard Hoagland, perhaps long ago sensing failure in his "Face on Mars" scheme, started downplaying it in favor of the ridiculous (and easily debunked) "City" on Mars, which then led to his totally over-the-top dumbosity of hyperdimensional physics. All of this, of course, fits (although "jammed-in-to-make-it-fit" would describe it better) into his over-blown conspiracy theory that NASA is Doing Nefarious Things.

RCH’s latest silliness is a book called Dark Mission. In the book, he and his cohort Mike Bara are making the same tired and painfully silly claims that NASA is hiding evidence of alien bases on the Moon, artifacts on Mars, conspiracies that go All The Way To The Top, yadda yadda. He also has a website describing it. Now, if I were to make a website to promote a book, I would take some of the best bits of the book and put them on the site.

Well, if the stuff on the site indeed represents the best examples from the book, I have to assume the rest of the book should have a toxic waste warning. It’s so profoundly goofy that it’s difficult to know where to start. Happily, Hoagland and Bara give me an excellent place to start debunking their goofiness: right on the very first page of the site.

If you go to the Dark Mission website (WARNING: extreme danger for brain cells!), the first image you see is this one:

This image shows astronaut Al Bean from Apollo 12 carrying the ALSEP (Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package). Hoagland cranked the contrast way up to show fainter features. See the pentagonal-shaped glow around Bean? On his website, Hoagland claims that this is actually "a massive tier of ‘glass-like ruins’", indicating — in his mind — that there is evidence of alien artifacts on the Moon. Bara makes this same ridiculous claim elsewhere.

Ignoring for a moment the overwhelmingly obvious problem of being able to see the lines of the pentagon in front of the astronaut — how massive can it be, if it’s between Bean and Pete Conrad (who took the picture)? — and also ignoring the obvious problem that this claim is bug-nut crazy, there is maybe a simple explanation.

The Hasselblad cameras used on Apollo had an iris inside, much like the one in your eye. It can open and close an aperture to let in more or less light. Guess what shape that aperture was? Yup: pentagonal.

That’s no glass ruin. It’s an internal reflection, inside the camera itself.

Mind you, this is the very first picture on Hoagland and Bara’s Dark Mission website. This gives you an idea of just how ridiculous this stuff is. They literally can’t even get the first thing right.

Note added December 18: Some commenters below have noted that in the book, it’s the vertical streamers in the background of the image that Hoagland and Bara cite as evidence for structures on the Moon (and also they do say the pentagon is an internal reflection). That is not at all clear from the page on RCH’s site to which I link, but that’s fine: the streamers are no more evidence of a structure than the pentagon is. Think of it: any structure bigger than a few hundred meters across is easily visible in a telescope, and it escapes me how a giant structure miles across would not have been seen hundreds of years ago by eager astronomers. Oh wait, it doesn’t escape me: Hoagland and Bara are wrong, and are amplifying defects in the images well beyond what is reasonable. This is their standard MO for such things. I stand corrected on the pentagon, but I still say they are dead wrong on just about everything else. And as I note near the bottom of this page; Hoagland is capable of actual image analysis when it suits his cause, but then turns around and does the most ridiculous image manipulation when it suits him as well. I leave it to the reader to draw their conclusions about him from that.

I could go on (and on and on and on), but why bother? Hoagland and Bara, as usual, never come within a glancing blow of reality. Going through the website (gah, the things I do for you BABloggees) is a seemingly endless mind-numbing journey through antiscience claptrap and truly awful claims. Not that I need to tell anyone here, but reading it is likely to melt your brain. You’d be closer to reality watching a few hours of Jerry Springer.

Did you know Hoagland and Bara actually held a press conference for the book? According to Dwayne Day at The Space Review, not only was it a flop, but it showed just how egregious these guys are. You should read Dwayne’s article; it’s great for a schadenfreude laugh or three.

I’m quite sure Hoagland and Bara will do a tour, going to UFO conventions and psychic fares to peddle their bunkum, just as I am quite sure there will be an eager audience lapping it up. Nonsense never ends, my friends. Happily, though, the truth really is out there.