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28.3 The distribution of galaxies in space  (Page 4/13)

Let’s pause here for a moment of perspective. We are now discussing numbers by which even astronomers sometimes feel overwhelmed. The Coma cluster may have 10, 20, or 30 thousand galaxies, and each galaxy has billions and billions of stars. If you were traveling at the speed of light, it would still take you more than 10 million years (longer than the history of the human species) to cross this giant swarm of galaxies. And if you lived on a planet on the outskirts of one of these galaxies, many other members of the cluster would be close enough to be noteworthy sights in your nighttime sky.

Central region of the coma cluster.

This combined visible-light (from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and infrared (from the Spitzer Space Telescope) image has been color coded so that faint dwarf galaxies are seen as green. Note the number of little green smudges on the image. The cluster is roughly 320 million light-years away from us. (credit: modification of work by NASA/JPL-Caltech/L. Jenkins (GSFC))

Really rich clusters such as Coma usually have a high concentration of galaxies near the center. We can see giant elliptical galaxies in these central regions but few, if any, spiral galaxies. The spirals that do exist generally occur on the outskirts of clusters.

We might say that ellipticals are highly “social”: they are often found in groups and very much enjoy “hanging out” with other ellipticals in crowded situations. It is precisely in such crowds that collisions are most likely and, as we discussed earlier, we think that most large ellipticals are built through mergers of smaller galaxies.

Spirals, on the other hand, are more “shy”: they are more likely to be found in poor clusters or on the edges of rich clusters where collisions are less likely to disrupt the spiral arms or strip out the gas needed for continued star formation.

Gravitational lensing

As we saw in Black Holes and Curved Spacetime , spacetime is more strongly curved in regions where the gravitational field is strong. Light passing very near a concentration of matter appears to follow a curved path. In the case of starlight passing close to the Sun, we measure the position of the distant star to be slightly different from its true position.

Now let’s consider the case of light from a distant galaxy or quasar that passes near a concentration of matter such as a cluster of galaxies on its journey to our telescopes. According to general relativity, the light path may be bent in a variety of ways; as a result we can observe distorted and even multiple images ( [link] ).

Gravitational lensing.

This drawing shows how a gravitational lens can make two images. Two light rays from a distant quasar are shown being bent while passing a foreground galaxy; they then arrive together at Earth. Although the two beams of light contain the same information, they now appear to come from two different points on the sky. This sketch is oversimplified and not to scale, but it gives a rough idea of the lensing phenomenon.

Gravitational lenses can produce not only double images, as shown in [link] , but also multiple images, arcs, or rings. The first gravitational lens discovered, in 1979, showed two images of the same distant object. Eventually, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to capture remarkable images of the effects of gravitational lenses. One example is shown in [link] .

Multiple images of a gravitationally lensed supernova.

Light from a supernova at a distance of 9 billion light-years passed near a galaxy in a cluster at a distance of about 5 billion light-years. In the enlarged inset view of the galaxy, the arrows point to the multiple images of the exploding star. The images are arranged around the galaxy in a cross-shaped pattern called an Einstein Cross. The blue streaks wrapping around the galaxy are the stretched images of the supernova’s host spiral galaxy, which has been distorted by the warping of space. (credit: modification of work by NASA, ESA, and S. Rodney (JHU) and the FrontierSN team; T. Treu (UCLA), P. Kelly (UC Berkeley), and the GLASS team; J. Lotz (STScI) and the Frontier Fields team; M. Postman (STScI) and the CLASH team; and Z. Levay (STScI))

General relativity predicts that the light from a distant object may also be amplified by the lensing effect, thereby making otherwise invisible objects bright enough to detect. This is particularly useful for probing the earliest stages of galaxy formation, when the universe was young. [link] shows an example of a very distant faint galaxy that we can study in detail only because its light path passes through a large concentration of massive galaxies and we now see a brighter image of it.

Distorted images of a distant galaxy produced by gravitational lensing in a galaxy cluster.

The rounded outlines show the location of distinct, distorted images of the background galaxy resulting from lensing by the mass in the cluster. The image in the box at lower left is a reconstruction of what the lensed galaxy would look like in the absence of the cluster, based on a model of the cluster’s mass distribution, which can be derived from studying the distorted galaxy images. The reconstruction shows far more detail about the galaxy than could have been seen in the absence of lensing. As the image shows, this galaxy contains regions of star formation glowing like bright Christmas tree bulbs. These are much brighter than any star-formation regions in our Milky Way Galaxy. (credit: modification of work by NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI))

We should note that the visible mass in a galaxy is not the only possible gravitational lens. Dark matter can also reveal itself by producing this effect. Astronomers are using lensed images from all over the sky to learn more about where dark matter is located and how much of it exists.

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OpenStax, Astronomy. OpenStax CNX. Apr 12, 2017 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11992/1.13
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