Gravitational Lensing.... Nature's Telescope

The title sounds really fancy and complicated, but gravitational lensing is really an awesome recent discovery and is pretty simple to understand. Think about how a magnifying glass works. You hold it over a book, and the light bouncing off the book goes through the glass and makes the writing appear bigger. The magnification is due to light being bent by the curved magnifying glass . Well it turns out the gravity from large objects can act just like a lens!

The picture above is a combination of a Hubble (visible light)  and Spitzer (infrared light) image that shows an example of gravitational lensing. That really bright fuzzy spot in the center is actually a cluster of hundreds of galaxies. Together, the gravity holding them together acts as one giant lens or magnifying glass. The wispy lines around the outside of the cluster are actually images of different galaxies, far behind the galaxy cluster, whose light has been bent and magnified (they have also been stretched out a bit too). So these galaxies (the book pages) are technically hiding behind the big galaxy cluster (the magnifying class) and normally we wouldn't be able to see them. But the cluster has acted like a lens by bending the light around the outside of the cluster, and magnifying it so that these hidden galaxies are visible.  It's like nature has provided us with a super massive and super powerful telescope! The galaxies in this specific image are actually 13.5 billion years old! They are currently the oldest know objects in outer space.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CRAL, LAM, STScI

The Face On Mars?!?!

We can't help but speculate the idea that life exists on other planets, and it's been long thought that alien life may exist on planets as close to us as Mars! One of the iconic images that really got people thinking is this photograph of the Martian surface taken by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1976.

Notice anything strange about the picture? (Remember, Photoshop wasn't invented yet!) Clearly there is some sort of rocky structure that looks like a human face!  Is this evidence for an ancient Martian civilization? Maybe it's the Martian's Mount Rushmore? For almost 25 years after this image was taken it dazzled the world and created a hype about the possibility of alien life. In 2001, the Mars Global Surveyor took a closer look at the structure, hoping see more evidence of civilization. Sadly (at least for those who like alien hunting), the new sharper image of the face on Mars revealed that it is just an ironically shaped mountain that when viewed at low resolution happens to resemble a human face (see below).

 I know, I know, definitely not the ending you were hoping for. But the search for alien life on Mars is still on! Stay tuned for further updates ...

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Image Credits: NASA/JPL

Haumea, The Egg Shaped Dwarf Planet

The term dwarf planet is a new classification of astronomical bodies. A dwarf planet is a body that is within our solar system, but is too small or has to strange of an orbit to be classified as a regular planet. Pluto is now a dwarf planet, along with a handful of other objects in the Kuiper belt (the chain of "leftover" planet material  at the edge of our solar system). Most dwarf planets are small, round and rocky, and some even have moons! Haumea (pronounced how-me-ah) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt with two peculiar properties:

 1) It is believed to be egg shaped
 2)  It's made of Crystalline water

 

The image above is an artists impression of what we think Haumea and its moons look like.

As you may have noticed, pretty much everything in the universe (except for galaxies) is shaped like a sphere. Why this planet is shaped like an egg, no one knows. It's also incredibly strange that it's made of crystalline water. It's too far away from the sun, and therefore not  technically warm enough, to have water in crystal form on its surface. Astronomers have a few theories about how this could happen, but it's still in the investigation stage. It's funny, most people think that astronomers know everything there is know about the universe, especially our solar system. And yet there is still so much more to learn!

Image credit: NASA