Tag: gravitational lens

Visionaries Old And New

On By rolcottIn Astronomy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Cathleen’s back at the mic. “Let’s have a round of applause for Maria, Jeremy, Madison and C‑J. Thank you all. We have a few minutes left for questions… Paul, you’re first.”

“Thanks, Cathleen. A comment, not a question. As you know, archeoastronomy is my specialty so I applaud Jeremy’s advocacy for the field. I agree with his notion that the Colorado Plateau’s dry, thin air generally lets us see more stars than sea‑level Greeks do. When I go to a good dark sky site, it can be difficult to see the main stars that define a constellation because of all the background dimmer stars. However, I don’t think that additional stars would change the pictures we project into the sky. Most constellations are outlined from only the brightest stars up there. Dimmer stars may confuse the issue, but I very much doubt they would have altered the makeup of the constellations a culture defines. Each culture uses their own myths and history when finding figures among the stars.”

“Thanks for the confirmation from personal experience, Paul. Yes, Sy?”

“Another comment not a question. I’m struck by how Maria’s Doppler technique and Jeremy’s Astrometry complement each other Think of a distant stellar system like a spinning plate balanced on a stick. Doppler can tell you how long the stick is. Astrometry can tell you how wide the plate is. Both can tell you how fast it’s spinning. The strongest Doppler signal comes from systems that are edge‑on to us. The strongest Astrometry signal comes from systems we see face‑on. Those are the extreme cases, of course. Most systems are be at some in‑between angle and give us intermediate signals.”

“That’s a useful classification, Sy. Madison’s and C‑J’s transit technique also fits the edge‑on category. Jim, I can see you’re about to bust. What do you have to tell us about?”

“How about a technique that lets you characterize exoplanets inside a galaxy we see as only a blurry blob? This paper I just read blew me away.”

“Go ahead, you have the floor.”

“Great. Does everyone know about Earendel?” <blank looks from half the audience, mutters about ‘Lord Of The Rings?’ from several> “OK, quick refresher. Earendel is the name astronomers gave to the farthest individual star we’ve ever discovered. It’s either 13 or 28 billion lightyears away, depending on how you define distance. We only spotted it because of an incredible coincidence — the star happens to be passing through an extremely small region of space where light in our general direction is concentrated thousands‑fold into a beam towards us. Earendel may be embedded in a galaxy, but the amplification region is so narrow we can’t see stars that might be right next to it.”

<Feder’s voice> “Ya gonna tell us what makes the region?”

“Only very generally, because it’s complicated. You know what a magnifying lens does in sunlight.”

“Sure. I’ve burnt ants that way.”

“… Right. So what you did was take all the light energy hitting the entire surface of your lens and concentrate it on a miniscule spot. The concentration factor was controlled by the Sun‑to‑lens‑to‑spot distances and the surface area of the lens. Now bring that picture up to cosmological distances. The lens is the combined gravitational field of an entire galaxy cluster, billions of lightyears away from us, focusing light from Earendel’s galaxy billions of lightyears farther away. Really small spots at both ends of the light path and that’s what isolated that star.”

“That’s what got you excited?”

“That’s the start of it. This new paper goes in the other direction. The scientists used brilliant X‑ray light from an extremely distant quasar to probe for exoplanets inside a galaxy’s gravitational lens. Like one of your ants analyzing sunlight’s glare to assess dust flecks on your lens. Or at least their averaged properties. A lens integrates all the light hitting it so your ant can’t see individual grains. What it can do, though, is estimate numbers and size ranges. This paper suggests the lensing galaxy is cluttered with 2000 free‑floating planets per main‑sequence star — stars too far for us to see.”

~~ Rich Olcott

  • Thanks to Dave Martinez and Dr Ka Chun Yu for their informative comments.

A Thumbtack in A Needlestack

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, James Webb Space Telescope, Physics: Light and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“What’re the odds?”

“Odds on what, Vinnie?”

“A gazillion galaxies out there, only 41 lensing galaxy clusters, but one of them shows us a singleton star. I mean, what’s special about that star? What are the odds?”

I can’t help it. “Astronomical, Vinnie.”

Cathleen punches my shoulder, hard. “Sy Moire, you be ashamed of yourself. That pun was ancient a century ago. Vinnie, the odds are better than they seem. We didn’t just stumble on Earendel and the Sunrise Arc, we found them in a highly targeted Big Data search for things just like that — objects whose light was extremely stretched and also gravitationally bent in our direction. The Arc’s lensing galaxy cluster has a spherical effect, more or less, so it also acts on light from other far-away objects and sends it in other directions. It even bends an image of our Milky Way towards Earendel’s galaxy.”

“I call weaseling — you used ‘more or less‘.”

“Guilty as charged, Vinnie. A nice, spherical black hole is the simplest case of gravitational lensing — just one mass at the center of its simple light‑bending gravity field. Same thing for a single star like our Sun. Clusters are messy. Tens or hundreds of billion‑star galaxies, scattered at random angles and random positions about their common center of mass. The combined gravity field is lumpy, to say the least. Half of that research paper is devoted to techniques for estimating the field and its effects on light in the region around the Arc.”

“I guess they had to get 3D positions for all the galaxies in the cluster. That’d be a lot of work.”

“It would, Al, but that’s beyond what current technology can do. Instead, they used computer models to do — get this, Sy — curve fitting.”

<chuckle> “Good one, Cathleen.”

“What’s so funny?”

“There’s a well-established scientific technique called ‘curve fitting.’ You graph some data and try to find an equation that does a respectable job of running through or at least near your data points. Newton started it, of course. Putting it in modern terms, he’d plot out some artillery data and say, ‘Hmm, that looks like a parabola H=h+v·t+a·t2. I wonder what values of h, v and a make the H-t curve fit those measurements. Hey, a is always 32 feet per second per second. Cool.’ Or something like that. Anyhow, Cathleen’s joke was that the researchers used curve fitting to fit the Sunrise Arc’s curve, right?”

“They did that, Sy. The underlying physical model, something called ‘caustic optics,’ says that—”

“Caustic like caustic soda? I got burnt by that stuff once.”

Image by Heiner Otterstedt,
under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

“That’s the old name for sodium hydroxide, Vinnie. It’s a powerful chemical and yeah, it can give you trouble if you’re not careful. That name and caustic optics both come from the Greek word for burning. The optics term goes back to using a lens as a burning glass. See those focused patterns of light next to your water glass? Each pattern is a caustic. The Arc’s lensing cluster’s like any light‑bender, it’s enclosed in a caustic perimeter. Light passing near the perimeter gets split, the two parts going to either side of the perimeter. The Earendel team’s curve‑fitting project asked, ‘Where must the caustic perimeter be to produce these duplicate galaxy images neighboring the Arc?‘ The model even has that bulge from the gravity of a nearby foreground galaxy.”

“And the star?”

“Earendel seems to be smack on top of the perimeter. Any image touching that special line is intensified way beyond what it ought to be given the source’s distance from us. It’s a pretty bright star to begin with, though. Or maybe two stars.”

“Wait, you don’t know?”

“Not yet. This study pushed the boundaries of what Hubble can do for us. We’re going to need JWST‘s infrared instruments to nail things down.”

Al’s in awe. “Wow — that caustic’s sharp enough to pick one star out of a galaxy.”

“Beat the astronomical odds, huh?”

Adapted from a public-domain image.
Credit: Science: NASA / ESA / Brian Welch (JHU) / Dan Coe (STScI); Image processing: NASA / ESA / Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

~~ Rich Olcott

Presbyopic Astronomy

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Techniques, Cosmology, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Her phone call done, Cathleen returns to the Spitzer Memorial Symposium microphone with her face all happiness. “Good news! Jim, the grant came through. Your computer time and telescope access are funded. Woo-hoo!!”

<applause across the audience and Jim grins and blushes>

Cathleen still owns the mic. “So I need to finish up this overview of Spitzer highlights. Where was I?”

Maybe-an-Art-major tries to help. “The middle ground of our Universe.”

“Ah yes, thanks. So we’ve looked at close-by stars but Spitzer showed us a few more surprises lurking in the Milky Way. This, for instance — most of the image is colorized from the infra‑red, but if you look close you can see Chandra‘s X‑ray view, colorized purple to highlight young stars.”

The Cepheus-B molecular cloud
X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/K. Getman et al.; IRL NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA/J. Wang et al

<hushed general “oooo” from the audience>

“Giant molecular clouds like this are scattered throughout the Milky Way, mostly in the galaxy’s spiral arms. As you see, this cloud’s not uniform, it has clumps and voids. By Earth standards the cloud is still a pretty good vacuum. The clumps are about 10-15 of our atmosphere’s density, but that’s still a million times more dense than our Solar System’s interplanetary space. The clumps appear to be where new stars are born. The photons and other particles from a newly-lit star drive the surrounding dust away. My arrow points to one star with a particularly nice example of that — see the C-shape around the star?”

The maybe-an-Art-major pipes up. “How about that one just a little below center?”

“Uh-huh. There’s so much activity in that dense region that the separate shockwaves collide to create hot spots that’ll generate even more stars in the future. The clouds are mostly held together by their own gravity. They last for tens of millions of years, so we think of them as huge roiling stellar nurseries.”

“Like my kid’s day care center but bigger.”

“Mm-mm, but let’s turn to the Milky Way’s center, home of that famous black hole with the mass of four million Suns and this remarkable structure, a double-helix of warm dust.”

False-color infra-red image of the Double-Helix Nebula
The double helix nebula.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Morris (UCLA)

Vinnie blurts out, “That’s a jet from a black hole! One of Newt’s babies.”

Newt can’t resist breaking into Cathleen’s pitch. “Maybe it’s a jet, Vinnie. Yes, it’s above the central galactic plane and perpendicular to it, but the helix doesn’t quite point to the central black hole.”

“So take another picture that follows it down.”

“We’d love to, but we can’t. Yet. That image came from a long-wavelength instrument that only operated during Spitzer‘s initial 5-year cold period. Believe me, there are bunches of astronomers who can’t wait for the James Webb Space Telescope‘s far-IR instruments to get into position and start doing science. Meanwhile, we’ve got just the one image and a few earlier ones from an even less-capable spacecraft. This thing may be a lit-up part of a longer structure that twists down to the black hole or at least its accretion disk. We just don’t know.”

Cathleen takes control again. “The next image comes from outside our galaxy — far outside.”

Spitzer visualization of Galaxy MACS 1149-JD1
Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/W. Zheng (JHU), and the CLASH team

The maybe-an-Art-major snorts, “Pointillism derivative!”

“No, it’s pixels from a starfield image with a very low signal-to-noise ratio. That red blotch in the center is one of the most distant objects ever observed, gracefully named MACS 1149-JD1. It’s a galaxy 13.2 billion lightyears away. That’s so far away that the expansion of the Universe has stretched the galaxy’s emitted photons by a factor of 10.2. Spectrum-wise, 1149-JD1’s ultra-violet light skipped right past the visible range and down into the near infra-red. Intensity-wise, that galaxy’s about 5200 times further away than the Andromeda galaxy. Assuming the two are about the same overall brightness, 1149-JD1 would be about 27 million times fainter than Andromeda.”

“How can we even see anything that dim?”

“We couldn’t, except for a fortunate coincidence. Right in line between us and 1149-JD1 there’s a massive galaxy cluster whose gravity acts like a lens to focus 1149-JD1’s light.”

The seminar’s final words, from maybe-an-Art-major — “A distant light, indeed.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Dark Passage

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Techniques, Cosmology, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Change-me Charlie’s not giving up easily. “You said that NASA picture did three things, but you only told us two of them — that dark matter’s a thing and that it’s separate from normal matter. What’s the third thing? What exactly is in that picture? Does it tell us what dark matter is?”

The Bullet Cluster ( 1E 0657-56 )

Physicist-in-training Newt’s ready for him. “Not much of a clue about what dark matter is, but a good clue about how it behaves. As to what’s in the picture, we need some background information first.”

“Go ahead, it’s not dinner-time yet.”

“First, this isn’t two stars colliding. It’s not even two galaxies. It’s two clusters of galaxies, about 40 all together. The big one on the left probably has the mass of a couple quintillion Suns, the small one about 10% of that.”

“That’s a lot of stars.”

“Oh, most of it’s definitely not stars. Maybe only 1-2%. Those stars and the galaxies they form are embedded in ginormous clouds of proton-electron plasma that make up 5-20% of the mass. The rest is that dark matter you don’t like.”

“Quadrillions of stars are gonna make a super-super-nova when they collide!”

“Well, no. That doesn’t even happen when two galaxies collide. The average distance between neighboring stars in a galaxy is 200-300 times the diameter of a star so it’s unlikely that any two of them will come even close. Next level up, the average distance between galaxies in a cluster is about 60 galaxy diameters or more, depending. The galaxies will mostly just slide past each other. The real colliders are the spread-out stuff — the plasma clouds and of course the dark matter, whatever that is.”

Astronomer-in-training Jim cuts in. “Anyway, the collision has already happened. The light from this configuration took 3.7 billion years to reach us. The collision itself was longer ago than that because the bullet’s already passed through the big guy. From that scale-bar in the bottom corner I’d say the centers are about 2 parsecs apart. If I recall right, their relative velocity is about 3000 kilometers per second so…” <poking at his smartphone> “…the peak intersection was about 700 million years earlier than that. Call it 4.3 billion years ago.”

“So what’s with the cotton candy?”

Newt looks puzzled. “Cotton… oh, the pink pixels. They’re markers for where NASA’s Chandra telescope saw X-rays coming from.”

“What can make X-rays so far from star radiation that could set them going?”

“The electrons do it themselves. An electron emits radiation every time it collides with another charged particle and changes direction. When two plasma clouds interpenetrate you get twice as many particles per unit volume and four times the collision rate so the radiation intensity quadruples. There’s always some X-radiation in the plasma because the temperature in there is about 8400 K and particle collisions are really violent. The Chandra signal pink shows the excess over background.”

“The blue in the Jim’s picture is supposed to be what, extra gravity?”

“Basically, yeah. It’s not easy to see from the figure, but there are systematic distortions in the images of the background galaxies in the blue areas. Disks and ellipsoids appear to be bent, depending on where they sit relative to the clusters’ centers of mass. The researchers used Einstein’s equations and lots of computer time to work back from the distortions to the lensing mass distributions.”

“So what we’ve got is a mostly-not-from-stars gravity lump to the left, another one to the right, and a big cloud in the middle with high-density hot bits on its two sides. Something in the middle blew up and spread gas around mostly in the direction of those two clusters. What’s that tell us?”

“Sorry, that’s not what happened. If there’d been a central explosion the excess to the right would be arc-shaped, not a cone like you see. No, this really is the record of one galaxy cluster bursting through another one. Particle-particle friction within the plasma clouds held them back while the embedded galaxies and dark matter moved on.”

“OK, the galaxies aren’t close-set enough for them to slow each other down, but wouldn’t friction in the dark matter hold things back, too?”

“Now that’s an interesting question…”

~~ Rich Olcott

The Biggest Telescope in The Universe

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, Physics: Light and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Vinnie rocks back in his chair.  “These gravitational lenses, Cathleen.  How do you figure their apertures and f-numbers, space being infinite and all?”

She takes a breath to answer, but I cut in.  “Whoa, I never got past a snapshot camera.  How about you explain Vinnie’s question before you answer it?”Bird and lenses

“You’re right, Sy, most people these days just use their cellphone camera and have no clue about what it does inside.  Apertures and f-numbers are all just simple geometry.  Everything scales with the lens’ focal length.”

“That’s how far away something is that you’re taking a picture of?”

“No, it’s a characteristic of the lens itself.  It’s the distance between the midpoint of the lens and its focal plane, which is where you’d want to put the sensor chip or film in a camera.  The aperture is the diameter of the light beam entering the lens.  The optimal aperture, the image size, even the weight of the lens, all scale to the lens focal length.”

“I can see image size thing — the further back the focal plane, the bigger the image by the the time it gets there.  It’s like a lever.”

“Sort of, Vinnie, but you’ve got the idea.”

“The aperture scales to focal length?  I’d think you could make a lens with any diameter you like.”

“Sure you could, Sy, but remember you’d be using a recording medium of some sort and it’s got an optimum input level.  Too much light and you over-expose, too little and you under-expose.  To get the right amount of light when you take the shot the aperture has to be right compared to the focal length.”

“Hey, so that’s the reason for the old ‘Sunny 16‘ rule.  Didn’t matter if I had a 35mm Olympus or a big ol’ Rollei, if it was a sunny day I got good pictures with an f/16 aperture.  ‘Course I had to balance the exposure time with the film’s speed rating but that was easy.”

“Exactly, Vinnie.  If I remember right, the Rollei’s images were about triple the size of the little guy’s.  Tripled focal length meant tripled lens size.  You could use the same speed-rated film in both cameras and use the same range of f-stops.  The rule still works with digital cameras but you need to know your sensor’s ISO rating.”

“Ya got this, Sy?  Can we move on to Cathleen’s gravity lenses?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Well, they’re completely different from … I’ll call them classical lenses. That kind has a focal plane and a focal length and an aperture and only operates along one axis.  Gravitational lenses have none of that, but they have an infinite number of focal lines and rings.”

Gravitational lens and galaxy“Infinite?”

“At least in principle.  Any observation point in the Universe has a focal line running to a massive object’s center of gravity.  At any point along the line, you could look toward an object and potentially see all or part of a ring composed of light from some bright object behind it.  Einstein showed that a completed ring’s  visual angle depends on the deflector’s mass and the three distances between the observer, the deflector and the bright object.”

“The way you said that, there could be a bunch of rings.”

“Sure, one for each bright object shining onto the lens.  For that matter, the deflector itself could be complex — the gravity of a whole cluster of galaxies rather than the single black hole we’ve been assuming as an example.”

“That diagram reminds me of Galileo’s telescope, just a three-foot tube with an objective lens at the far end and an eyepiece lens to look through.  But it was enough to show him the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.”

“Right, Sy.  His objective lens was maybe a couple of inches across.  If its focal point was halfway down the tube, his scope’s light-gathering power would match an f/9 camera lens.  Gravitational lenses don’t have apertures so not an issue.”

“So here we are like Galileo, with a brand new kind of telescope.”

“Poetic, Vinnie, and so right.  It’s already shown us maybe the youngest galaxy, born 13 billion years ago.  We’re just getting started.”

~~ Rich Olcott

The Fellowship of A Ring

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Einstein ring 2018
Hubble photo from NASA’s Web site

Cathleen and I are at a table in Al’s coffee shop, discussing not much, when Vinnie comes barreling in.  “Hey, guys.  Glad I found you together.  I just saw this ‘Einstein ring’ photo.  They say it’s some kind of lensing phenomenon and I’m thinking that a lens floating out in space to do that has to be yuuuge.  What’s it made of, and d’ya think aliens put it there to send us a message?”

Astronomer Cathleen rises to the bait.  I sit back to watch the fun.  “No, Vinnie, I don’t.  We’re not that special, the rings aren’t signals, and the lenses aren’t things, at least not in the way you’re thinking.”

“There’s more than one?”

“Hundreds we know of so far and it’s early days because the technology’s still improving.”

“How come so many?”

“It’s because of what makes the phenomenon happen.  What do you know about gravity and light rays?”

“Me and Sy talked about that a while ago.  Light rays think they travel in straight lines past a heavy object, but if you’re watching the beam from somewhere else you think it bends there.”

I chip in.  “Nice summary, good to know you’re storing this stuff away.”Gravitational lens 1

“Hey, Sy, it’s why I ask questions is to catch up.  So go on, Cathleen.”

She swings her laptop around to show us a graphic.  “So think about a star far, far away.  It’s sending out light rays in every direction.  We’re here in Earth and catch only the rays emitted in our direction.  But suppose there’s a black hole exactly in the way of the direct beam.”

“We couldn’t see the star, I get that.”

“Well, actually we could see some of its light, thanks to the massive black hole’s ray-bending trick. Rays that would have missed us are bent inward towards our telescope.  The net effect is similar to having a big magnifying lens out there, focusing the star’s light on us.”

“You said, ‘similar.’  How’s it different?”Refraction lens

“In the pattern of light deflection.  Your standard Sherlock magnifying lens bends light most strongly at the edges so all the light is directed towards a point.  Gravitational lenses bend light most strongly near the center.  Their light pattern is hollow.  If we’re exactly in a straight line with the star and the black hole, we see the image ‘focused’ to a ring.”

“That’d be the Einstein ring, right?”

“Yes, he gets credit because he was the one who first set out the equation for how the rays would converge.  We don’t see the star, but we do see the ring.  His equation says that the angular size of the ring grows as the square root of the deflecting object’s mass.  That’s the basis of a widely-used technique for measuring the masses not only of black holes but of galaxies and even larger structures.”

“The magnification makes the star look brighter?”

“Brighter only in the sense that we’re gathering photons from a wider field then if we had only the direct beam.  The lens doesn’t make additional photons, probably.”

Suddenly I’m interested.  “Probably?”

“Yes, Sy, theoreticians have suggested a couple of possible effects, but to my knowledge there’s no good evidence yet for either of them.  You both know about Hawking radiation?”

“Sure.”

“Yup.”

“Well, there’s the possibility that starlight falling on a black hole’s event horizon could enhance virtual particle production.  That would generate more photons than one would expect from first principles.  On the other hand, we don’t really have a good handle on first principles for black holes.”

“And the other effect?”

“There’s a stack of IFs under this one.  IF dark matter exists and if the lens is a concentration of dark matter, then maybe photons passing through dark matter might have some subtle interaction with it that could generate more photons.  Like I said, no evidence.”

“Hundreds, you say.”

“Pardon?”

“We’ve found hundreds of these lenses.”

“All it takes is for one object to be more-or-less behind some other object that’s heavy enough to bend light towards us.”

“Seein’ the forest by using the trees, I guess.”

“That’s a good way to put, it, Vinnie.”

~~ Rich Olcott