Gravitational Lensing | Universe Today

It is well documented that dark matter makes up the majority of the mass in our universe. The big problem comes when trying to prove dark matter really is out there. It is dark, and therefore cannot be seen. Dark matter may come in many shapes and sizes (from the massive black hole, to the tiny neutrino), but regardless of size, no light is emitted and therefore it cannot be observed directly. Astronomers have many tricks up their sleeves and are now able to indirectly observe massive black holes (by observing the gravitational, or lensing, effect on light passing by). Now, large-scale structures have been observed by analyzing how light from distant galaxies changes as it passes through the cosmic web of dark matter hundreds of millions of light years across…
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As the search for extrasolar planets continues, researchers are finding systems more and more like our own Solar System. And today researchers announced another significant find: a system with two planets smaller than Jupiter and Saturn. It's almost starting to sound like home.
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As galaxies come together through successive mergers they take on the splendid spiral shape like our own Milky Way. Keep merging those larger galaxies, though, and you'll eventually get an elliptical galaxy - a gigantic diffuse cloud of ancient stars with little structure. Such a galaxy, NGC 1132, was recently photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Finding a black hole is an easy task… compared with searching for a wormhole. Suspected black holes have a massive gravitational effect on planets, stars and even galaxies, generating radiation, producing jets and accretion disks. Black holes will even bend light through gravitational lensing. Now, try finding a wormhole… Any ideas? Well, a Russian researcher thinks he has found an answer, but a highly sensitive radio telescope plus a truckload of patience (I'd imagine) is needed to find a special wormhole signature…
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Astronomers have several techniques to discover planets. But one of the least used so far, gravitational microlensing, might be just the right technique to find planets in the habitable zone of nearby dwarf stars.
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Black holes are already plenty bizarre. Imagine all the mass of several suns compressed down into an object of potentially infinitely small size. But what if you could find an object that's even stranger: a theoretical "naked singularity"; a black hole spinning so quickly that it lacks an event horizon. A point in space where the density is infinite, yet still visible from the outside.
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Astronomers announced today that they've located the most distant galaxies ever seen, 13.2 billion light-years away, formed when the Universe was only 500 million years old.

Galaxies that far away can't easily be seen directly with current telescopes. Instead, the researchers turned massive clusters of galaxies into natural telescopes, using a technique called gravitational lensing. As the light from the more distant galaxies passed the galaxy clusters, it was bent by gravity towards the Earth.
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A clever trick has enabled NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to calculate the distance to a distant object, confirming that it's part of our Milky Way. An even more intriguing finding is that the object is probably a binary pair of black holes, orbiting one another - an extremely rare thing to see.
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Astronomers are always trying to get their hands on bigger and more powerful telescopes. But the most powerful telescopes in the Universe are completely natural, and the size of a galaxy cluster. When you use the gravity of a galaxy as a lens, you can peer right back to the edges of the observable Universe.
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What role did dark matter play in the early Universe? Since it makes up the majority of matter, it must have some effect. A team of researchers is proposing that massive quantities of dark matter formed dark stars in the early Universe, preventing the first generations of stars from entering their main sequence stage. Instead of burning with hydrogen fusion, these "dark stars" were heated by the annihilation of dark matter.
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To see any distance in space, you need some kind of telescope. We've got some pretty powerful ones here on Earth, but nature has us beat with gravitational lenses. This is a phenomenon when a relatively nearby object passes directly between us and a more distant object. The gravity from the nearby object acts as like a telescope lens to bend light and magnify the more distant object.
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Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe, and astronomers believe they're caused by the outpouring of radiation from the environment around an actively feeding supermassive black hole. New research using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has looked inside a quasar, to see the disk of material spiraling into the black hole. Astronomers used the gravity from a relatively nearby galaxy as a gravitational lens to focus the light from the more distant quasar, giving this impressive view.
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There's more dark matter than regular matter in the Universe, and they're normally all mixed up together in galaxies. But astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have found a situation where dark matter and normal matter can be wrenched apart. In a collision between giant galaxy clusters, hot gas clouds in the clusters encounter friction as they pass through one another, separating them from the stars. The dark matter isn't affected by this friction either, so astronomers were able to calculate the effect of its gravity on regular matter.
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When a star flared briefly, astronomers knew it was because a dimmer star had passed directly in front, acting as a lens with its gravity to focus light. Unfortunately, they couldn't find the star. This was important, because the brief microlensing event also turned up the fact that this lensing star has a planet. Astronomers have used the power of the Hubble Space Telescope to find this dim star two years after the lensing event. Identifying the star is critical, because it allows astronomers to measure its unique characteristics, such as mass, temperature and composition.
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Imagine looking at red houses, and sometimes you see a crow fly past. But every time you look at a blue house, there's always a crow flying right in front of the house. The crow and the house could be miles apart, so this must be impossible, right? Well, according to a new survey if you look at a quasar, you'll see a galaxy in front 25% of the time. But for gamma ray bursts, there's almost always an intervening galaxy. Even though they could be separated by billions of light years. Figure that out. Dr. Jason X. Prochaska, from the University of California, Santa Cruz speaks to me about the strange results they've found, and what could be the cause.
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