
Hubble Telescope Discovers a Light-Bending 'Einstein Ring' in Space - katiey
https://www.space.com/40255-hubble-telescope-einstein-ring-photo.html
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Groxx
They're quite neat, but haven't we had pictures of these for quite a while? Is
there something new about this one, or is it ("just") an article reminding
people that cool stuff still exists?

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Sharlin
Yep, and the article pretty much admits that in the second half. The featured
picture itself is years old. Title is pure clickbait.

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soared
Its not clickbait - the article says we know about less than 12 Einstein
rings. So finding 1 occurence of something we've only seen 12 of seems
significant.

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Sharlin
Hmm... I could've sworn I've seen that exact photo several times before. But
NASA does seem to claim it's new. Or at least the nasa.gov page was _edited_
recently...

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soared
Yeah another comment said the image is of an older one. There probably isn't a
photo of the new one yet

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LargeWu
It never, ever ceases to amaze me how right Einstein was without the ability
to test his hypotheses. At the time it was all groundbreaking theoretical work
yet it mostly holds up to empirical studies.

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auxbuss
Einstein was the first to truly grasp James Clerk Maxwell's work. If Maxwell
hadn't died in 1879 at only 48, then I like to imagine he would have produced
Special Relativity – most of it is there in his famous equations.

Einstein also had the benefit of knowing the null result of the
Michelson–Morley experiment (1887), and Hertz's experimental confirmation of
electromagnetic waves moving at the speed of light (1889) predicted by
Maxwell.

Einstein, of course, explicitly recognised Maxwell and kept a picture of him
on his office wall.

While Einstein's theoretical work is fabulous, it was Maxwell who first broke
away from the mechanical model; something that even his illustrious
contemporaries struggled to understand.

If you appreciate Einstein, yet know little of Maxwell, then _The Man Who
Changed Everything_ [0] is a great introduction.

[0]
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29442.The_Man_Who_Change...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29442.The_Man_Who_Changed_Everything)

~~~
LargeWu
Thanks for that, I wasn't aware of Maxwell, I'll have to do some reading.

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8bitsrule
One ( SDSSJ0146-0929) of 37 objects in a program to image strong lensing
fields with Hubble.

[http://www.stsci.edu/hst/phase2-public/13003.pro](http://www.stsci.edu/hst/phase2-public/13003.pro)

"The fundamental unit of star formation in the Universe is neither a star, nor
a galaxy, but a star forming region with a typical scale of at most 100s of
parsecs."

More interesting stuff at: [http://www.stsci.edu/](http://www.stsci.edu/)

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hydandata
This is lame in comparison with the cosmic smiley face:
[https://www.space.com/28512-cosmic-smiley-face-hubble-
photo....](https://www.space.com/28512-cosmic-smiley-face-hubble-photo.html)

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sp332
I'm getting cross-domain errors on the images on this page. The main one of
the ring has this URL
[https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1...](https://img.purch.com/h/1400/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA3NS81ODAvb3JpZ2luYWwvaHViYmxlLXRlbGVzY29wZS1laW5zdGVpbi1yaW5nLXNpemVkLmpwZw==)
and if you base64-decode the last part you get
[http://www.space.com/images/i/000/075/580/original/hubble-
te...](http://www.space.com/images/i/000/075/580/original/hubble-telescope-
einstein-ring-sized.jpg)

Here's the first video
[https://videos-f.jwpsrv.com/content/conversions/xTYS7F8k/vid...](https://videos-f.jwpsrv.com/content/conversions/xTYS7F8k/videos/6bIODlgQ-27818548.mp4?token=0_5acfd164_0x4c2e8625ae7324269fa7feef9b945134353223ae)

Second video
[https://videos-f.jwpsrv.com/content/conversions/xTYS7F8k/vid...](https://videos-f.jwpsrv.com/content/conversions/xTYS7F8k/videos/TL0N71gH-27818548.mp4?token=0_5acfd1c9_0x74110f948de0dfb98110489b5b1ea02d276c6524)

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sp332
Edit: The cache tokens have expired so the video links don't work anymore, but
the site seems to be working better now.

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_bxg1
According to comments here we've apparently taken pictures of these before,
but I didn't know that and it's amazing seeing an actual photo of something so
dramatic.

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jermaustin1
It seems like these would be more prevalent, at least partial "rings". With
how large space is, I'd assume there has to be something SUPER bright behind
tons SUPER massive objects/clusters/whatever.

I guess we just aren't always lined up with them?

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BurningFrog
Also, we haven't looked everywhere yet.

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sizzzzlerz
Is there an active survey underway to find other examples or do they stumble
across one when reviewing images acquired earlier for completely different
purposes? Are there automated scanners that can search or is it by human
observation?

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InclinedPlane
Yes actually, sort of. Gravitational lensing of remote galaxies is one of the
core techniques for mapping the 3D distribution of mass in nearer galaxies and
galaxy clusters, which makes it a fantastic tool for studying dark matter.
Occasionally they find these Einstein rings as well.

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0xfaded
Is there standard software which is run on satellite images to detect these
and other phenomena?

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stareatgoats
Quite OT, but these phenomena always reminds me of how wrong (popular
understanding of) Einstein actually is. Whereas gravity according to that
understanding warps the fabric of space itself, these pictures prove that
gravity actually only _appears_ to warp space.

I.e. our intuitive, euclidean concept of space is actually the most correct,
albeit an abstract, inferred phenomenon.

~~~
kowdermeister
No, this phenomenon actually proves that space really is warped, otherwise you
wouldn't see the light from behind a galaxy cluster because light follows a
straight line.

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stareatgoats
Even the concept of 'warped' space itself indicates that the intuitive,
euclidean concept is correct, the light does in fact not travel in a straight
line, it follows a 'warped' line.

The difference between the two is that the 'warped' space is what we observe
(because observing is an electromagnetic process, subject to gravity), 'real'
space is something we can only infer (or observe in photos like in the linked
article)

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roywiggins
I don't think that's quite right. You can theoretically detect the local
curvature of space by measuring the angles made by a sufficiently exact
triangle. If space is flat, such a triangle will have interior angles that sum
to a half turn. If it's curved, it will deviate from that. And that's
something you can do more or less entirely locally and is a property of the
space you're inhabiting.

We can know the Earth is round without any reference to Euclidean space or
Euclidean coordinates- just trace out a big triangle and you could observe
that the interior angles will sum to more than 180 degrees.

~~~
stareatgoats
With all due respect, you don't seem to understand what I am saying: I
completely agree that such _measurements_ will show that space is curved, it's
not like we disagree there. These measurements are however _appearances_ ,
with the twist that such measurements provide the only viable map of
locations.

The _real_ space is useless for most intents and purposes (since our
interactions are bounded by the properties of light and gravity, and thus
appearances is what guides us).

It seems important to make the conceptual distinction however, and not confuse
reality with appearances, in this case as well as every other.

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elohhim
Have you seen comments on this article on the original site? What is wrong
with those people?

~~~
maze-le
Well, I've seen worse, at least no one gets threatened. But it doesn't suprise
me one bit. About 6 years ago I started to abandon comment sections
altogether, because every second poster or so had some agenda politically,
religiously or some esoteric nuthouse BS. This directly affects the quality of
the other (genuineley interested) postings, because they started to argue with
the trolls and shills. What once were intersting fora of conversation became
snake pits. Not everywhere, but to a significant degree.

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thr0000waay
why none of these articles mention non-desarguian geometry?

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ugh123
Enlighten us with what that means and perhaps we'll be able to tell you why
its not in the article...

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thr0000waay
Most common axiomatic geometry is Desarguian. Its projective.

[https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Desargues_assum...](https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Desargues_assumption)

When light is bent while passing by a huge mass, this axiom fails so does the
geometry.

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jacquesm
Either that or a very large marble. Amazing picture.

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HugoDaniel
Does this mean time travel is possible ?

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gpvos
No, not at all. Why would you think that?

