This isn’t going to shake up the big questions in cosmology, but it might change the way you think about the night sky. Those stars you see? They may not be where you think they are.
Gravitational lenses operate like funhouse mirrors in deep space. They can magnify, distort and bend the light from distant galaxies, and make them appear in different places than where you would expect. (No word yet on whether they can make galaxies look taller or thinner or shorter or heavier or wavier…) Gravitational lenses, as their name suggests, are usually giant galaxies so massive that they bend spacetime—and thus redirect light or anything else that happens to be traveling close by.
They can be helpful to astronomers: the magnification and redirection of light allows stargazers to see farther into deep space. And thus, farther back in time.
The Cosmological Evolution Survey (COSMOS), led by Nick Scoville at Caltech, recently completed a long, hard look at a patch of the sky roughly equal to the area of 9 full moons (1.6 square degrees). The survey used data from the major league of telescopes: the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, and the VLT all contributed images. The researchers found 67 new gravitational lenses.
As a galaxy, it can get difficult out there in the black. Just cold chillin' on your own gets, well, cold. Elliptical galaxy NGC 1132 (pictured) survives by 1) being huge and 2) containing enormous amounts of dark matter comparable to what you might find in entire groups of galaxies.
This new Hubble image captures the scale of the ginormous galaxy, which either formed as a solo "lone-wolf" amidst tons of galaxy clusters or perhaps merged with other galaxies in recent history. The amount of dark matter classifies the galaxy as a "fossil-group" system, a rare galaxy that formed when growth of moderate-sized galaxies got suppressed, leaving only one massive galaxy to form.
The elliptical NGC 1132 emanates tons of yellow light — which pours out from the aging stars within. Since it's 318 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus, it's not like we'll have any contact. But hey, 1132 — if you get too lonely, don't be afraid to text us or something.
Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by Houghton Mifflin, who are going to be very busy if they have to rewrite their astronomy textbooks:
We told you we'd post up pics when they came back from Messenger, and here they are — just click for hi-res:
Sure it looks kind of like the moon, but already a few unique things are coming out from this picture. The topography of the Caloris Basin, one of the largest impact areas in the solar system, is revealed in full. We can also see bands or cliffs called "rupes" that score some of the craters. These are places where tectonic uplift occurred after crater impact, showing that Mercury still may have geological compression going on.
We'll keep you posted on any other Mercurial developments.
It seems that since we've been observing the solar system, someone is always trying to find Planet X. Sometimes the search leads to something significant, like Pluto, but usually nothing turns up. But now that Pluto's been demoted, the hunt is on to find another object to replace it.
In a distant region of the Kuiper Belt known as the Kuiper cliff, the number of objects drops off sharply. Also, the rocks within the Kuiper Belt follow three distinct orbits. Lykawka thinks Planet X might have sculpted the Kuiper Belt in this manner.
I just finished watching Danny Boyle's sci-fi opus Sunshine last night, and it was pretty incredible as a purely visual, visceral experience. Even though the film loses a bit of face with a credibility-stretching horror twist near the end, it was one of my better sci-fi experiences in recent memory. (Heavy emphasis on the fi: The loopy science only gets loopier, but they certainly make it look believable. And who doesn't want to believe we could fire a nuke the size of Manhattan into the core of the sun to reignite it?)
"LSST is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. The 8.4-metre LSST telescope and the 3-gigapixel camera are thus a shared resource for all humanity — the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe."
— Bill Gates -Microsoft co-founder.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, partially funded by $30 million from Microsoft founders Bill gates and Charles Simyoni, the developer of Word and Excel, is projected for ‘first light’ in 2014 in Chile's Atacama Desert -the world's Southern Hemisphere space-observatory mecca. The 8.4-meter telescope will be able to survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3-billion pixel digital camera. The telescope will probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, and it will open a movie-like window on objects that change or move rapidly: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids and distant Kuiper Belt objects.
We all had ourselves a big cry earlier this year as Pluto got demoted from its position as the ninth planet. Suddenly, the phrase "as far away as Pluto" lost its power, now that we were talking about a "dwarf planet." Noooooooooo!
But thanks to today's Giftology item, we don't have to let Pluto go gently into that unofficial, elliptical orbit night. The Pluto R.I.P. t-shirt both helps you maintain your sexy and gives a fond farewell to that frozen chunk of rock and ice we loved so. The science may say otherwise, but the little guy was always more than a wayward object from the Kuiper Belt to us. Tell the world and pour a forty for Pluto with this snazzy t-shirt.
Astronomers have taken a snapshot of a cosmic rarity, the merging of three galaxies. And oh what a picture! By combining a 30 minute infrared exposure from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the stargazers managed to produce this pretty three-color portrait of a galactic hybrid, known as either ESO 593-IG 008 or IRAS 19115-2124, 650 million light years away.
The researchers already knew that the stellar smash-up involved two galaxies, but three? (See next page for an image where you can clearly count all three galactic nuclei.)
That hole your gazing at to the left isn't just any lame, B&W cave; it's a sinkhole on freaking Mars. It reminds us that Mars is more than a dot in the sky and a place to send people in 75 years — it's a real, live place with rocks, tunnels and maybe even signs of former life. Bad Astronomy collects their Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007, and they all inspire the same sense of wonder and reveal new things as well. Kinda whets your appetite for next year's crop of sick astronomy photos.
Other photos include Comet Holmes swelling larger than the sun, Io and Europa captured in the same shot, light bent by dark matter, and chaos in the Vela supernova. They're all gorgeous, and all inspiring. Check out two more after the jump.
It's time to grab some Schlitz, St. Ides or Olde English and pour a forty: Voyager 2 has left our solar system for good. Voyager 2 first hit space in '77 and crossed the 'termination shock' -- the transition region between the bubble dominated by the sun's solar wind and interstellar space -- on August 30 of this year. To put it in perspective, Voyager 2 left Earth when swinging was cool and Star Wars movies ruled, whereas by the time Voyager 2 left the solar system, swinging got relegated to old folks in the 'burbs and Star Wars movies sucked.
But Voyager 2 ain't going out without giving us some sweet information. Voyager 1 crossed this same boundary in 2004, but Voyager 2 did it almost 1 billion miles closer to the sun, suggesting that something is compressing the bubble that contains the outermost reaches of solar wind -- which is generally considered the edge of the solar system.
Oh, those creationists — you gotta give 'em credit for putting up a fight. These brief excerpts from the documentary "A Question of Origins" seek to tackle both astronomy and genetics with a cable-access budget and dime-store logic. A lot of the arguments within the astronomy doc amount to "because it exists, God did it," but I'm particularly fond of the "scientists have no answer as to why four planets have rings, or why each planet is so unique." Ha!
Check out the genetics clip after the jump, and let the laughter continue.
I just finished watching Danny Boyle's sci-fi opus 
We all had ourselves a big cry earlier this year as Pluto got demoted from its position as the ninth planet. Suddenly, the phrase "as far away as Pluto" lost its power, now that we were talking about a "dwarf planet." Noooooooooo!
That hole your gazing at to the left isn't just any lame, B&W cave; it's a sinkhole on freaking Mars. It reminds us that Mars is more than a dot in the sky and a place to send people in 75 years — it's a real, live place with rocks, tunnels and maybe even signs of former life. 
It's time to grab some Schlitz, St. Ides or Olde English and pour a forty: 
