Hubble Picture Prompts New Understanding of Einstein Ring

[bystander]

Hubble Snapshot of "Molten Ring" Galaxy Prompts New Research
NASA | GSFC | STScI | HubbleSite | 2021 Sep 23

ESA/Hubble POTW Prompts New Understanding of Einstein Ring
ESA Hubble Science Release | 2021 Sep 23

In December 2020 the ESA/Hubble team published a stunning view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered. This observation has since been used to develop a lensing model to study the physical properties of the lensed galaxy. Scientists have successfully measured the distance to the object and determined the magnification factor to be 20, which effectively makes Hubble’s observing capability equivalent to that of a 48-metre telescope.

Rings of Relativity ~ Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Jha

---

In December 2020 ESA/Hubble published an image in the Picture of the Week series depicting GAL-CLUS-022058s, located in the southern hemisphere constellation of Fornax (The Furnace). The image shows the largest and one of the most complete Einstein rings ever discovered, and was nicknamed the "Molten Ring'' by the Hubble observation’s Principal Investigator, which alludes to its appearance and host constellation.

​​First theorised to exist by Einstein in his general theory of relativity, this object’s unusual shape can be explained by a process called gravitational lensing, which causes light shining from far away to be bent and pulled by the gravity of an object between its source and the observer. In this case, the light from the background galaxy has been distorted into the curve we see by the gravity of the galaxy cluster sitting in front of it. The near exact alignment of the background galaxy with the centre of the galaxy cluster, seen in the middle of this image, has warped and magnified the image of the background galaxy into an almost perfect ring. The gravity from the galaxies in the cluster is soon to cause additional distortions.

A team of European astronomers have now used a multi-wavelength dataset, which includes inputs from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and this featured image, to study this Einstein ring in detail. Archival data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) FORS instrument determined the redshift value of the lensed galaxy. ...

The Einstein Ring GAL-CLUS-022058s: a Lensed
Ultrabright Submillimeter Galaxy at z = 1.4796 ~ A. Díaz-Sánchez et al

• Astrophysical Journal 919(1):48 (2021 Sep 20) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac0f75
  arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2106.14281 > 27 Jun 2021 (v1), 21 Sep 2021 (v2)

viewtopic.php?t=41220#p308961

[neufer]

The Persistence of Memory

---

<<The Persistence of Memory (Catalan: La persistència de la memòria) is a 1931 painting by artist Salvador Dalí and one of the most recognizable works of Surrealism. First shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932, since 1934 the painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which received it from an anonymous donor. It is widely recognized and frequently referred to in popular culture, and sometimes referred to by more descriptive titles, such as "Melting Clocks", "The Soft Watches" or "The Melting Watches". The well-known surrealist piece epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness", which was central to his thinking at the time. As Dawn Adès wrote, "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order". This interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity.

The orange clock at the bottom left of the painting is covered in ants. Dalí often used ants in his paintings as a symbol of decay. Another insect that is present in the painting is a fly, which sits on the watch that is next to the orange watch. The fly appears to be casting a human shadow as the sun hits it. It is possible to recognize a human figure in the middle of the composition, in the strange "monster" (with much texture near its face, and much contrast and tone in the picture) that Dalí used in several contemporary pieces to represent himself – the abstract form becoming something of a self-portrait, reappearing frequently in his work.>>