Monday, July 28, 2008

Your Monday Nerd Quota

These are SO COOL! Einstein predicted (70+ years ago) that the gravity around a large galaxy has the ability to bend light from another galaxy, if the gravitational force is large enough. Einstein theorized this after publishing his theory of general relativity (which relates to gravity). NASA telescopes proved this theory 1979, but there have been some really neat pictures since this.
Here is the latest one from NASA. The bright "star" in the middle is a galaxy (SDSSJ1430 to be exact), and the blue ring around it is actually a magnified galaxy behind it! They were even able to reconstruct the image to see what the blue galaxy looked like (top right).

For a cool demo of gravitational lensing, check this site out:
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/Bolton7-08/lensing_animation.html

Hope that quenches your thirst for random info...:)

3 comments:

Gatfly said...

I'm drowning here....

Trish said...

I'm a little late -- but I see that Congratulations are in order! How very exciting!

Mary Mathwig said...

You guys have the wildest Blog. Whenever do you find the time to do this?

Love you.

Auntie M