Space Warps Talk

Gravity Lens

  • neillfw 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

    Posted

  • Budgieye 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.

    Posted

  • neillfw 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!

    Posted