Gravity Lens
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by neillfw
What part of the galaxy on the left of this image is being lensed and what part is the foreground galaxy? Is there any way to know if a better quality version of any of these images has been taken? I'd love to see this closer up
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by Budgieye moderator
Wouldn't we all!
This is a sim, so it is not real. Also it is not very realistic. Capella05 has labelled it as a simfail. To summarise, the pretend arc has been put around a spiral galaxy that is not big enough to create a big arc.
But the big round arc, seen in the u band here http://tools.zooniverse.org/#/dashboards/spacewarp/52780d73fe16d937e9000007 would be the background galaxy that is being lensed. It is spread out in a circle.
The center area. which has the nucleus of the spiral galaxy and some of its arms, is the lensing galaxy.
I'm not sure what the pink area is, maybe a satellite galaxy, or a star in our galaxy overlapping.
These are good quality images. You have to remember this is a tiny bit of sky that most telescopes couldn't hope to image. If it wasn't a sim, the next step would be to look with Hubble Space Telescope, which gives the best images.
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by neillfw
Thanks for the reply, I was thinking some of the sims looked a little strange, that makes a lot more sense now.
Every time I see one of these tiny close ups and think about how much is in such a tiny section of such a hugely detailed picture of matter so far away it makes me wish somehow we could look at everything way closer!
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