Astronomers accidentally discovered a new galaxy 11 billion light years from Earth

Astronomers have accidentally discovered a new galaxy 11 billion light years from Earth, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers were looking at another cluster of galaxies called SDSS J223010.47-081017.8, which they discovered to be what they thought was a perfect reflection of the galaxy and its companion.

This discovery was made due to the gravitational lens that was first predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

This happens when a large object, such as a cluster of galaxies, creates a gravitational field that distorts and amplifies the light of the galaxies behind it, but at the same time, NASA.

The effect is similar to that seen in a magnifying glass and allows researchers to discover the first galaxies that have never been seen before using modern technology.

“We were very shocked,” said Timothy Hamilton, astronomer at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio. a report.

The reflected images are now referred to as Hamilton’s subject, after Hamilton.

“My first thought was that they could contact galaxies with clean, outstretched hands,” Hamilton added. “It’s not quite right, but I don’t know what to think either.”

Hubble looked at the nuclei of active galaxies called quasars, which appeared to be a reflection of one of two bright images.

“Consider the rippled surface of a swimming pool on a sunny day and show patterns of bright light at the bottom of the pool,” Richard Griffiths, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

These light patterns below are caused by an effect similar to gravitational lenses. The ripples on the surface act as partial lenses and focus the sunlight on the bright sailing patterns below.

The double object with a strange object nearby looked like galactic protuberances.

It was determined that the linear objects were in fact rectangular images of distant galaxies.

The gravitational lens was predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Einstein’s theory was demonstrated in July, when scientists were able to see light for the first time behind a black hole.

This phenomenon is caused by the attraction of dense dark matter, which makes up most of the mass of the universe.

Scientists can’t (yet) see the dark object, but when light from a distant galaxy comes out of the cluster, it forms two glassy images and a third.

“This gravitational lens is very different from most lenses Hubble has read before, especially in the Hubble Frontier Fields cluster survey,” Griffiths explained.

You don’t have to look at these groups for a long time to find multiple lenses. In that sense, that’s the only goal we have. We didn’t know the group at the start. “

Jenny Wagner, an expert in gravitational lenses at the University of Heidelberg, and Nicolas Desr, another expert in gravitational lenses, have developed a program to understand these unique lenses and show that the dark color around the stretched images must be “evenly distributed” .

“It’s great that we only need two images of glass to measure how bitter or dark the material is under these conditions,” Wagner said.

“Here, we don’t use any lens model. We can take notes from multiple photos and share them with each other. By our method, it can be folded together. This actually gives us an idea of ​​how smooth dark matter is in these two phases. ”

However, Griffiths notes that 100 years after its discovery, dark matter remains a mystery.

We know it’s kind of a thing, but we don’t know what this particle is. So we have no idea how he will act. We know that it has mass and that it is subject to gravity.

The importance of size limits in relation to chunks or softness gives us some clues as to what a particle is.

The smaller the dark matter, the larger the particles must be. “

This study was recently published in the monthly announcements of the Royal Astronomical Society.