... and a sextet of images.Another team of astronomers has for the first time discovered a gravitational lens gravitational lens n. A massive celestial object, such as a galaxy, whose gravity bends and focuses the light of a more distant object, resulting in a magnified, distorted, or multiple image of the original light source for a distant observer. in which the image of a distant galaxy has been split into six distinct images. This unusual configuration is caused by three galaxies acting as a compound lens compound lens n. See lens. compound lens See lens. Noun 1. compound lens - a lens system consisting of two or more lenses on the same axis , strung out along the line of sight between the distant galaxy and Earth. Simpler than a lens produced by a galaxy cluster, yet more complicated than that generated by a single galaxy, this type of lens is expected to be rare. Study coauthor David Rusin or the University of Pennsylvania (body, education) University of Pennsylvania - The home of ENIAC and Machiavelli. http://upenn.edu/. Address: Philadelphia, PA, USA. in Philadelphia says, "[It] will give us insights we can't get from other types of lenses." The team expects to learn about the structure of the galaxies serving as lenses. The galaxy whose image has been split lies 11 billion light-years from Earth. The galaxies that act as a lens lie 4 billion light-years closer to Earth. Rusin and his colleagues describe their work in the Aug. 20 ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL The Astrophysical Journal, often abbreviated to ApJ, is a scientific journal covering astronomy and astrophysics. It was founded in 1895 by George Ellery Hale and James E. Keeler. It currently (October 2006) publishes three issues per month, with 500 pages per issue. . Both the Very Large Array Radio Telescope in Socorro, N.M., and the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in England showed hints of six objects that astronomers suspected were images generated by a gravitational lens. Follow-up data from the Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the first large optical orbiting observatory. Built from 1978 to 1990 at a cost of $1.5 billion, the HST (named for astronomer E. P. Hubble) was expected to provide the clearest view yet obtained of the universe. and the Very Large Baseline Array, a group of 10 radio telescopes spread across the United States, confirmed the finding and provided additional details about the structure of the system. |
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