Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: UNAWE Space Scoop – Natural Binocular Finds A Baby Galaxy On A Cosmic Merry-Go-Round
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : http://365daysofastronomy.org/ ; https://www.spacescoop.org/sl/scoops/2106/natural-binocular-finds-baby-galaxy-on-a-cosmic-roundabout/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Have you ever tried birdwatching? When a bird is too high up a tree or just too darn far away, it’s hard to see its color or shape clearly. Hard to tell which species it is…
So you might need a pair of binoculars to help magnify that little critter.
This is because the more distant an object is from us, the harder it is for us to see it. The inverse square law and all that.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
Today’s sponsor: Big thanks to our Patreon supporters this month: David Bowes, Dustin A Ruoff, Brett Duane, Kim Hay, Nik Whitehead, Timo Sievänen, Michael Freedman, Paul Fischer, Rani Bush, Karl Bewley, Joko Danar, Steven Emert, Frank Tippin, Steven Jansen, Barbara Geier, Don Swartwout, James K. Wood, Katrina Ince, Michael Lewinger, Phyllis Simon Foster, Nicolo DePierro, Tim Smith.
Please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the “Donate” button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.
Or please visit our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy
Transcript:
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
Natural Binocular Finds A Baby Galaxy On A Cosmic Merry-Go-Round
Have you ever tried birdwatching? When a bird is too high up a tree or just too darn far away, it’s hard to see its color or shape clearly.
Hard to tell which species it is…
So you might need a pair of binoculars to help magnify that little critter.
This is because the more distant an object is from us, the harder it is for us to see it. The inverse square law and all that.
OK, no surprises there.
I recommend that you all get yourself a pair of binoculars. Look for 7 x 50 or 10 x 50 binocs that cost around $100 US dollars. These will be your best, favorite and most often used astronomical tools.
Astronomers of course have the same challenge as birdwatchers or birders: galaxies and stars that are very far away appear smaller and fainter making it extremely difficult to see what’s inside them.
To see what, uh, species THEY are!
And the farther we look into space, the more we see into the past, as light takes time to reach us, even though it travels at the incredible speed of 300,000 km/s!
Astronomers believe that most of the small and faint galaxies that we see out there might have formed early on, closer to the Big-Bang.
A team of researchers managed to see the light from a very far out and small galaxy, with the romantic name RXCJ0600-z6. Let’s call it z6 for short, ok?
It was born when our almost 14 billion-year-old Universe was still very young, only a billion years old. Just a baby!
Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array or ALMA, radiotelescope in Chile, but also had a great deal of help from a “natural binocular”, or maybe a bit more accurately a natural telescope!
It was the gravitational lensing effect of a gigantic galaxy cluster, called RXCJ0600-2007.
The fact that this cluster is a thousand trillion times the mass of the Sun, means that its strong gravity makes the spacetime around it warp or bend, amplifying the light of objects behind it like a giant natural lens or a magnifying glass.
This effect helped magnify the light of the more-distant z6 baby galaxy. As the galaxy appears bent in the images because of gravitational lensing, the astronomers got busy!
They used data from other telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the VLT in Chile to reconstruct the actual shape of the galaxy and cancel out the fun-house-mirror distortion of the lensing effect.
Do you know what they found?
Z6, the galaxy they were looking at, is rotating, almost like it were riding an amusement park roundabout or merry-go-round!
This is quite odd because gas in young galaxies is generally thought to not flow in any particular direction — it moves randomly, like moths flying around a streetlight.
This is the first time astronomers can actually see the internal movement of a baby galaxy so far away, so far back in time, with such faint light.
The researchers hope that a better understanding of how this galaxy works can give them important clues about galaxy evolution and the early Universe, getting us all a step closer to understanding the Big Bang.
Hey, here’s a cool fact:
Scientists observed the gravitational lensing effect for the first time in May 1919 during a solar eclipse that nowadays is world-famous because it was the first to prove that Einstein’s theory of general relativity was right.
A team in Sobral, in northeast Brazil, and another on the island of Príncipe, off the west coast of Africa, observed the same eclipse and saw that stars in the constellation Taurus were not exactly where they should be — because of the gravitational influence of the Sun!
How cool is that?
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post-production by Richard Drumm. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes.
This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you! Please consider supporting to our show on Patreon.com/365DaysofAstronomy and get access to bonus content.
After 10 years, the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast is entering its second decade of sharing important milestone in space exploration and astronomy discoveries. Join us and share your story. Until tomorrow! Goodbye!