Astronomers believe they have long since solved a mystery that was discovered nearly ten years ago Hubble Space Telescope.
The dilemma centered on a strange “double galaxy,” a pair of UFOs that it once refused to explain. Scientists believe that things are actually distances galaxy It seems that there are two, thanks to the “ripple” in the structure of space, which expands and distorts its image.
From Earth, about 11 billion light-years away, the repeating objects look like mirror images. When astronomers first saw them in 2013, they immediately suspected a condition Gravity lenses A phenomenon that occurs when light from a distant object, such as an image through a fish dish, is distorted. gravity Anything else between this object and the observer.
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He answered in the name of, but not on what or why. Hubble saw relatively few gravitational lensed objects at the time, and that was more than an outline. Gravitational lensing not only enlarged the galaxy, but also simulated and created two sharper images, as well as a faint third copy, which can also be seen in the image.
After years of pondering this problem, astronomers have finally identified the culprit: between Hubble and the object about 7 billion light-years from Earth, is a large, undisturbed group of galaxies. In addition, the lens galaxy rests on a type of wave in space caused by the charge-dense gravity. dark matter, a mysterious substance that makes up about 85% of the mass in the universe.
Scientists said that more images are created when light from a distant galaxy passes through this cluster in the foreground.
“Think of the undulating surface of the pool on a sunny day, which shows patterns of bright light at the bottom of the pool,” says Richard Griffiths, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Came in a statement.
“These clear patterns at the bottom are due to the effect of gravitational lenses,” said Griffiths, lead author of a recent study announcing the results. “The waves act on the surface like partial lenses and focus sunlight into a shiny wavy pattern in the plane.”
Team members said the “wave” could help astronomers understand how dark matter is distributed throughout the universe. For example, by comparing Hubble images with lenses and computer models, scientists have found that the dark matter in question is not chaos, but rather easily scattered.
“It’s remarkable that we only need two mirror images to know how viscous dark matter is at these positions,” co-author Jenny Wagner, an astronomer at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, said in the same statement. .
studying Featured in the September issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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