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Astronomers have just discovered the first known "Einstein zigzag."

Due to a rare, lucky cosmic alignment, the combined gravity of two galaxies bent light like spaghetti & split a distant quasar into six different images.

This six-part image could allow a very accurate measure of the expansion of the universe.

https://www.science.org/content/article/first-known-double-gravitational-lens-could-shed-light-universe-s-expansion #science #space #astronomy #physics

Visualization of the optical paths of the lensed images. The two zig-zag paths, D and F, are marked in pink and blue respectively. The deflectors cause two sets of sharp turns, while the smooth curvature seen in all paths is due to the expansion of space.

Corey S Powell 5 Tage her •

The full paper on "The first Einstein zig-zag lens" is freely available here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04177

HST /WFC3 composite image of J1721+8842. The six lensed point images of the background quasar are labeled with letters. The red lensed arc, previously believed to be the host galaxy of a second source quasar, is highlighted in white. This arc is actually an additional deflector at an intermediate redshift, which is itself lensed by the central foreground galaxy in the image. The dotted red square indicates the footprint of the JWST/NIRSpec observation which enabled the mea- surement of the arc’s redshift.

J1721+8842: The first Einstein zig-zag lens

We report the discovery of the first example of an Einstein zig-zag lens, an extremely rare lensing configuration. In this system, J1721+8842, six images of the same background quasar are formed by two intervening galaxies, one at redshift $z_1 = 0.

^arXiv.org

Jennifer Ouellette hat dies geteilt

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