Nifty wrote: ↑Fri May 25, 2018 10:33 pm
There's another 'dumbbell' shaped object (pair of objects?) to be seen in the hi-res image directly above the giant elliptical, left of the two spiky stars. Looks interesting. Speaking of spiky stars, are any of those bright spiky objects quasars?
They look like a pair of stars to me. They could be a pair of quite distant Milky Way stars, located thousands of light-years away. Or they could be more nearby, but very faint. Wouldn't it be interesting if they were a pair of white dwarfs?
As for quasars, like Chris said, quasars are unusual, while stars are a dime a dozen. Probability itself says that spiky objects are nearby stars.
In the pictures above, however, you can see a pair of quasars. However, they are really just one quasar, being lensed by a foreground massive elliptical galaxy. The two images of the same quasar are labeled A and B, while the lensing galaxy is labeled C.
Wikipedia wrote:
In this new Hubble image two objects are clearly visible, shining brightly. When they were first discovered in 1979, they were thought to be separate objects — however, astronomers soon realised that these twins are a little too identical! They are close together, lie at the same distance from us, and have surprisingly similar properties. The reason they are so similar is not some bizarre coincidence; they are in fact the same object. These cosmic doppelgangers make up a double quasar known as QSO 0957+561, also known as the "Twin Quasar", which lies just under 9 billion light-years from Earth.
Quasars are the intensely powerful centres of distant galaxies. So, why are we seeing this quasar twice? Some 4 billion light-years from Earth — and directly in our line of sight — is the huge galaxy YGKOW G1. This galaxy was the first ever observed gravitational lens, an object with a mass so great that it can bend the light from objects lying behind it.
As a Color Commentator and lover of all blue things, I note, of course, that the quasars look blue. The way I understand it, most quasars look bluish when seen from the Earth. That is because quasars emit absolutely huge amounts of ultraviolet and far-ultraviolet light, which is then redshifted into the shortwave part of the visible spectrum on its (many) billion light-year journey to us. Only the most distant quasars (or the most dust-choked ones) look non-blue when seen from the Earth.
Ann
Galaxies Away
