#Gravitationally Lensed Quasars

[planetaryalphabet]

This is not a diamond ring in space… it’s Gravitationally Lensed Quasar beautifully explained by fille_delespace at the link.

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[theofficialastronomy101]

Have you seen the latest from JWST?

Here we have a gravitationally lensed quasar located 6 billion light-years from Earth.

More scientifically known as RX J1131-1231, this quasar's unique appearance is a result of its light being warped by the gravitational field of an elliptical galaxy. It’s so hard to believe that this image is over 6 billion light years away!

[merelygifted]

A gravitationally lensed quasar looks just like a sparkling piece of jewelry

The James Webb Space Telescope finds a jeweled ring in the cosmos | Space

[jofiah]

top 5 cellestial objects

TRAPPIST-1 - This is a whole star system but I'm counting them all. Absolutely magical place with seven planets around a star just barely larger than Jupiter. The entire system fits within the distance from Sol to Mercury. 3(!) of the planets are in the habitable zone, and all are roughly earth-like. They are so close to each other that you could see the other planets in their skies. It is older than our own solar system. It's just so much.

Phoenix A - The central black hole of the Phoenix Cluster. The sheer size of this thing makes me cry.

Quasi-stars (Black Hole Stars) - Does this count? They're theoretical, but whatever. Potentially the largest stars to have ever existed. Their cores would have been black holes, but maintained equilibrium between gravity and the black hole's outward radiation pressure. It's wild.

Einstein Cross - A gravitationally-lensed quasar forming a cross shape - you see the same image of it in 4 different positions due to light bending around a foreground galaxy!

The Pillars of Creation - It's a classic, but this is still one of my favourite things I've ever seen. There's something so emotional about images of this.

There's so much more I could put in here that it's genuinely so hard to pick five lmao

[spacenutspod]

A gravitational lens is the ultimate funhouse mirror of the Universe. It distorts the view of objects behind them but also supplies amazing information about distant galaxies and quasars. Astronomers using Hubble Space Telescope (HST) recently released a new image of one of these weird apparitions called “The Carousel Lens”. It’s a rare alignment of seven background galaxies that all appear distorted by an intervening galaxy cluster. According to Berkeley Lab senior scientist David Schlegel, this gravitational lens is a great find for astronomers. “This is an amazingly lucky ‘galactic line-up’—a chance alignment of multiple galaxies across a line-of-sight spanning most of the observable universe,” he said. “Finding one such alignment is a needle in the haystack. Finding all of these is like eight needles precisely lined up inside that haystack.” The Carousel Lens was uncovered in Dark Energy Survey data a few years ago. Now astronomers are zeroing in on it to measure its mass and the effects on the images of more distant galaxies. This gravitational lens alignment of seven galaxies and a foreground galaxy cluster could well provide new insights into the early Universe via the high-redshift galaxy sources, the properties of the lensing cluster, and unanswered questions in cosmology. An example of the Carousel gravitational lens found in the DESI Legacy Surveys data. There are four sets of lensed images in DESI-090.9854-35.9683. They correspond to four distinct background galaxies — from the outermost giant red arc to the innermost bright blue arc. All of them appear gravitationally warped — or lensed — by the orange galaxy at the very center. Deconstructing the Carousel Gravitational Lens Typical large-scale gravitational lenses in the Universe consist of a “lensing object” and more distant objects behind it. Generally, those distant objects are galaxies and quasars. (Small-scale gravitational lenses occur when a planet passes in front of its star, for example.) However, the Carousel Lens is more “cosmic” in nature, covering objects millions of light-years apart. In particular, the cluster doing the lensing is about 5 billion light-years from Earth. It’s also designated as DESI-090.9854-35.9683 and has at least four large galaxy members as well as several other possible cluster members. The Carousel lenses at least seven distant galaxies. They lie anywhere from 7.62 to 12 billion light-years away from Earth. Their alignment with the lensing cluster resulted in multiple images of each of the more distant galaxies. Their shapes are the result of the “funhouse mirror” effect that stretches their apparitions. The galaxy labeled “4a, 4b, 4c, 4d” actually forms a nearly perfect “Einstein Cross”, which shows the symmetrical distribution of mass in the lens. The Carousel is a great example of a “strong lens” in the Universe, according to Xiaoshang Huang, who is part of the team at Berkeley studying it. “Our team has been searching for strong lenses and modeling the most valuable systems,” said Huang. “The Carousel Lens is an incredible alignment of seven galaxies in five groupings that line up nearly perfectly behind the foreground cluster lens. As they appear through the lens, the multiple images of each of the background galaxies form approximately concentric circular patterns around the foreground lens, as in a carousel. It’s an unprecedented discovery, and the computational model generated shows a highly promising prospect for measuring the properties of the cosmos, including those of dark matter and dark energy.” The Carousel Lens as seen by the HST marked up by the galaxies. The “L” indicators near the center (La, Lb, Lc, and Ld) show the most massive galaxies in the lensing cluster. Seven unique galaxies (numbered 1 through 7) – located an additional 2.6 to 7 billion light years beyond the lens – appear in multiple, distorted “fun-house mirror” iterations (indicated by each number’s letter index, e.g., a through d), as seen through the lens. (Credit: William Sheu (UCLA) using HST data.) What Makes this Lens So Special? In their recently released paper, Schlegel, Huang, and others described modeling the Carousel Lens to understand its structure. They point out that it shows nearly every lensing configuration that astronomers see in such apparitions. There are various arcs, diamond shapes, the Einstein Ring, and double lensing. The big spread of distances between the lens itself and the galaxies it’s distorting also presents some interesting cosmological areas of study. In particular, the science team hopes to do more spectral studies to understand the lensing cluster’s matter distribution. At least seven lensed sources will help constrain the amount of matter in the cluster and aid in understanding the amounts of dark and baryonic matter in such systems. In addition to matter distribution, the team can also use this lensing system as a way to understand the characteristics of the distant lensed sources. This is important because the most distant ones give insight into conditions in their various epochs of cosmic history. For example, source 7 is an interesting “nearby” source that could be a very high-redshift “quiescent” galaxy. It appears to be very “red” in infrared measures and others of this sort have been observed by HST. Source 7 could be an efficient example of what’s called “early galaxy quenching”. That occurs when star formation shuts down and the galaxy becomes quiescent. There are several ways that could happen, but the most common is some kind of feedback loop between the central supermassive black hole and outlying regions. This could occur as a result of galaxy mergers, for example, which were very common in the early Universe. The Carousel Lens (and others of its type) provides a special way to study that epoch of cosmic history and the events that shaped the galaxies we see today. For More Information Magnifying Deep Space Through the ‘Carousel LensThe Carousel Lens: A Well-modeled Strong Lens with Multiple Sources Spectroscopically Confirmed by VLT/MUSE Gravitational lens found in the DESI Legacy Surveys data The post This Might Be the Best Gravitational Lens Ever Found appeared first on Universe Today.

[msamba]

New JWST image of gravitationally lensed quasar! #space #science #shorts

[sciexpo]

New JWST image of gravitationally lensed quasar! #space #science #shorts

[pipuisci]

New JWST image of gravitationally lensed quasar! #space #science #shorts

[cavenewstimes]

Webb Sees Four Images of Same Gravitationally Lensed Quasar

A quasar called RX J1131-1231 resides approximately 6 billion light-years away in the constellation of Crater. This Webb image shows the RX J1131-1231 galaxy distorted by gravitational lensing into a dim ring; at the top of the ring are three very bright spots with diffraction spikes coming off them, right next to each other; these are copies of a single quasar in the lensed galaxy, duplicated…

[kreuzaderny]

Evidence for a milli-parsec separation Supermassive Black Hole Binary with quasar microlensing

We report periodic oscillations in the 15-year long optical light curve of the gravitationally lensed quasar QJ0158-4325. The signal is enhanced during a high magnification microlensing event undergone by the fainter lensed image of the quasar, between 2003 and 2010. We measure a period of Po=172.6±0.9 days. We explore four scenarios to explain the origin of the periodicity: 1- the high magnification microlensing event is due to a binary star in the lensing galaxy, 2- QJ0158-4325 contains a massive binary black hole system in its final dynamical stage before merging, 3- the quasar accretion disk contains a bright inhomogeneity in Keplerian motion around the black hole, and 4- the accretion disk is in precession. Among these four scenarios, only a binary supermassive black hole can account for both the short observed period and the amplitude of the signal, through the oscillation of the accretion disk towards and away from high-magnification regions of a microlensing caustic. The short measured period implies that the semi-long axis of the orbit is ∼10−3pc, and the coalescence timescale is tcoal∼1000 years, assuming that the decay of the orbit is solely powered by the emission of gravitational waves. The probability of observing a system so close to coalescence suggests either a much larger population of supermassive black hole binaries than predicted, or, more likely, that some other mechanism significantly increases the coalescence timescale. Three tests of the binary black hole hypothesis include: i) the recurrence of oscillations in photometric monitoring during any future microlensing events in either image, ii) spectroscopic detection of Doppler shifts (up to 0.01c), and iii) the detection of gravitational waves through Pulsar Timing Array experiments, such as the SKA, which will have the sensitivity to detect the ∼100 nano-hertz emission.    

[spaceexp]

Astronomers Revisit First ‘Einstein Ring’ In Archival Data

NASA - Chandra X-ray Observatory patch. June 2, 2020 Determined to find a needle in a cosmic haystack, a pair of astronomers time traveled through archives of old data from W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauankea in Hawaii and old X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to unlock a mystery surrounding a bright, lensed, heavily obscured quasar.

Image above: Examples of Einstein ring gravitational lenses taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. Image Credits: NASA/ESA/SLACS Survey Team: A. Bolton (Harvard/Smithsonian), S. Burles (MIT), L. Koopmans (Kapteyn), T.Treu (UCSB), L. Moustakas (JPL/Caltech). This celestial object, which is an active galaxy emitting brilliant amounts of energy due to a black hole devouring material, is an exciting object in itself. Finding one that is gravitationally lensed, making it appear brighter and larger, is exceptionally exciting. While slightly over 200 lensed unobscured quasars are currently known, the number of lensed obscured quasars discovered is in the single digits. This is because the feeding black hole stirs up gas and dust, cloaking the quasar and making it difficult to detect in visible light surveys. Not only did the researchers uncover a quasar of this type, they found the object happens to be the first known Einstein ring, named MG 1131+0456, which was observed in 1987 with the Very Large Array network of radio telescopes in New Mexico. Remarkably, though widely studied, the quasar’s distance, or redshift, remained a question mark.

Image above: A radio image of MG 1131+0456, the first known Einstein ring, taken with the Very Large Array network of radio telescopes. Image Credit: VLA. “As we dug deeper, we were surprised that such a famous and bright source never had a distance measured for it,” said Daniel Stern, senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and author of the study. “Having a distance is a necessary first step for all sorts of additional studies, such as using the lens as a tool to measure the expansion history of the universe and as a probe for dark matter.”

Chandra X-ray Observatory. Animation Credits: NASA/CXC

NASA has provided funding for the Keck Observatory Archive, which made this research possible, since 2005. The new study was published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. Read more from Keck Observatory: http://www.keckobservatory.org/first-einstein-ring/ Chandra X-Ray Observatory: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/main/index.html Images (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Tricia Talbert. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Full article

[scifigeneration]

Taking the temperature of dark matter

Warm, cold, just right? Physicists at the University of California, Davis are taking the temperature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about a quarter of our universe.

We have very little idea of what dark matter is and physicists have yet to detect a dark matter particle. But we do know that the gravity of clumps of dark matter can distort light from distant objects. Chris Fassnacht, a physics professor at UC Davis and colleagues are using this distortion, called gravitational lensing, to learn more about the properties of dark matter.

The standard model for dark matter is that it is 'cold,' meaning that the particles move slowly compared to the speed of light, Fassnacht said. This is also tied to the mass of dark matter particles. The lower the mass of the particle, the 'warmer' it is and the faster it will move.

The model of cold (more massive) dark matter holds at very large scales, Fassnacht said, but doesn't work so well on the scale of individual galaxies. That's led to other models including 'warm' dark matter with lighter, faster-moving particles. 'Hot' dark matter with particles moving close to the speed of light has been ruled out by observations.

Former UC Davis graduate student Jen-Wei Hsueh, Fassnacht and colleagues used gravitational lensing to put a limit on the warmth and therefore the mass of dark matter. They measured the brightness of seven distant gravitationally lensed quasars to look for changes caused by additional intervening blobs of dark matter and used these results to measure the size of these dark matter lenses.

If dark matter particles are lighter, warmer and more rapidly-moving, then they will not form structures below a certain size, Fassnacht said.

"Below a certain size, they would just get smeared out," he said.

The results put a lower limit on the mass of a potential dark matter particle while not ruling out cold dark matter, he said. The team's results represent a major improvement over a previous analysis, from 2002, and are comparable to recent results from a team at UCLA.

Fassnacht hopes to continue adding lensed objects to the survey to improve the statistical accuracy.

"We need to look at about 50 objects to get a good constraint on how warm dark matter can be," he said.

A paper describing the work is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Additional coauthors are: W. Enzi, S. Vegetti and G. Despali, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany; M. W. Auger, Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, U.K.; L. V. E. Koopmans, Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, The Netherlands and J. P. McKean, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

[penmeetspage]

Quasars are thus one of the few sources visible from billions of light-years away, all the way back to when the universe was forming its first stars, an era known as the Epoch of Reionization. Hundreds of quasars are known at these large distances, but to be seen from so far away, they must be unusually bright, and therefore unusually massive.

How do quasars become so massive so early on? Some theorists argued they might not actually be that massive — a large fraction of them could be gravitationally lensed, aligned right behind an intervening galaxy that acts as a cosmic telescope to boost the quasar’s brightness.

[relaxedastronomer]

A study out of UCLA, is finding a single value for the universe expansion rate. They are using an effect called a double quasar which is when a quasar happens and is gravitationally lensed around an intervening galaxy. Since quasars pulse the researchers were able to time the difference in the pulse between the gravitational lens and the non. Knowing a few other things the team was able to come up with a value of 72 (km/s)sMpc (kilometers per second per Mega Parsec). Photo Credit: Hubble Space Telescope, Treu et. al. 2019 - - - #astronomy #space #science #beauty #earth #physics #spacetravel #solarsystem #universe #cosmos #human #art #milkyway #astronomyposts #explore #sky #nature #photography #astrophotography #nightsky #beauty #friends #life #astronomynerd #astronomyfacts #astronomyphotos #planet #night #travel #cosmos https://www.instagram.com/p/BtGv0fWjLt8/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1umng9skk0t13

[arxt1]

The properties of the X-ray corona in the distant ($z=3.91$) quasar APM 08279+5255. (arXiv:2205.01113v1 [astro-ph.HE])

We present new joint XMM-Newton and NuSTAR observations of APM 08279+5255, a gravitationally-lensed, broad-absorption line quasar ($z=3.91$). After showing a fairly stable flux ($f_{\rm2-10}\simeq4-5.5\times10^{-13}\rm~erg~s^{-1}$) from 2000 to 2008, APM 08279+5255 was found in a fainter state in the latest X-ray exposures ($f_{\rm2-10}\simeq2.7\times10^{-13}\rm~erg~s^{-1}$), which can likely be ascribed to a lower X-ray activity. Moreover, the 2019 data present a prominent Fe K$\alpha$ emission line and do not show any significant absorption line. This fainter state, coupled to the first hard X-ray sampling of APM 08279+5255, allowed us to measure X-ray reflection and the high-energy cutoff in this source for the first time. From the analysis of previous XMM-Newton and Chandra observations, X-ray reflection is demonstrated to be a long-lasting feature of this source, but less prominent prior to 2008, possibly due to a stronger primary emission. The estimated high-energy cutoff ($E_{\rm cut}=99_{-35}^{+91}$ keV) sets a new redshift record for the farthest ever measured and places APM 08279+5255 in the allowed region of the compactness-temperature diagram of X-ray coronae, in agreement with previous results on high-$z$ quasars.

from astro-ph.HE updates on arXiv.org https://ift.tt/HiUSG8h