Hello inful person. This is Anton and today we're going to discuss a relatively intriguing discovery that we've actually never seen before. A discovery of what you see right here.
And though this might not look like much, the scientists who discovered this are now referring to this as Einstein's zigzag. A kind of a variation from the typical Einstein ring or Einstein cross that have been previously discovered by many different telescopes in the last few decades. But unlike previous discoveries like the Einstein ring you see right here, this time this one is really special and somewhat unusual.
And so let's discuss this in a little bit more detail. But I guess let's start with the basics of how all of this works. All of this is of course a type of a gravitational lens or essentially the banding of light as a result of some kind of a massive object between the observer and the source of the light.
The concept originally theorized and proposed by Einstein in the early 1900s and then for the first time ever confirmed by the famous Sir Arthur Addington. This was the famous Addington experiment that on 29th of May 1919 was able to prove Einstein correct by observing a slight deviations of the travel of the starlight during the totality and during the solar eclipse which basically resulted in this headline in the New York Times and also made Einstein pretty much famous overnight. But today these gradiational lenders are also important for a slightly different reason.
Because the light in this case travels from the same object but it very often reaches planet earth at different times since it actually travels a slightly different distance. This technically allows us to see the same object at different times and with a different red shift which for cosmology is super important. It essentially allows researchers to calculate how fast the universe is expanding and also allows us to test various theories in regards to red shift and the mysterious dark energy.
And so these Einstein rings or really anything to do with gravitational lensing is basically like a treasure for astronomers and cosmologists. And so most of the cosmological secrets will most likely one day be solved by observing a lot of these lenses. And turns out that one telescope has actually been fundamental in discovering so many more.
That telescope is the James Web. In the last two years, it actually discovered some really incredible lenses and some we've never seen before. As a matter of fact, just last year, it discovered JWST ER1, the most distant gravitationally lensed object we've ever seen.
Roughly around 21 billion light-years away from our planet and previously completely invisible. But naturally, even Hubble telescope was pretty good at discovering these as well. Here are just some of the discoveries from the last few years.
And even more recently, Hubble completely by accident discovered one of the most important gravitational lenses in the last few decades. It's the lens that you see right here. It's now referred to as the carousel lens because it basically contains a bunch of different galaxies whose light is coming from different distances anywhere from 7 to 12 billion lightyear away from the planet.
And specifically, there are at least seven galaxies that all appear to be relatively normal, relatively quiet, but still visible because of this lensing, even though they're super far away. So basically in this lens we're seeing various objects billions of light years apart with at least one galaxy galaxy 4 forming an almost perfect Einstein cross and a galaxy known as 7 discovered to be some kind of a ancient red galaxy that for some reason seems to be completely quiet and is not forming new stars. Now we still don't really know much about this and it hasn't been studied in more detail but this was an intriguing discovery from Hubble.
But then just a few months later, James Webb basically said, "Yeah, hold my beer. Here is something even more impressive. " This is now referred to as G721 + 8842 or unofficially Einstein's zigzag based on the discovery from back in 2018.
Here, this was a somewhat unusual discovery of four bright points billions of light-years away from us that also appear to have two additional points that were much dimmer. And well, initially this was assumed to be some kind of an Einstein cross. Here's a typical example from back in 1985.
And this is of course a very similar principle. We have a very bright, very distant object whose light creates four individual points as it's bent by some kind of a mass between us and this object. But in 2021, an additional study, and here we're talking about this study by Lemon and his team, suggested that this could be some kind of a binary object or even a binary quazer with essentially two super massive black holes very close to each other, possibly even orbiting that produced these six points.
And on top of this, there was also a discovery of a somewhat faint red Einstein ring that you can see right here. And this is when this object became super interesting. But it looks like that study might have been actually incorrect because once researchers took a look at these two points once again, the ones that were not as bright, they realized that this is actually all the same object.
And so instead of a binary quazer that was duplicated three times, this seemed to be a single quazer that basically made six copies. And all of this was confirmed through a very thorough reanalysis, including the analysis of spectrum showing what these galaxies contain, which confirmed that this was indeed the same object. But the object that was basically bent in a very bizarre way in a way we've never seen before.
With the additional discovery basically suggesting that these newly discovered bright spots have actually been lensed twice around a second massive object, which then also formed this unusual Einstein ring. And so in essence, if we were to try to imagine what all of this looks like, we have the first deflector at a red shift of 1. 88 and the second deflector that's much closer, which essentially causes the light here to kind of go through an unusual zigzag forming these six points and a somewhat unfinished Einstein ring.
With all of this basically confirmed after approximately 2 years of observations, when the researchers realize that there's basically just a slight delay in time between all of these six images. So it's essentially kind of like looking at separate frames of the same object, but those faint points represented the farthest distance traveled, implying that this light is doubly lensed and represents highly redshifted photons, which is basically a gold mine for cosmologists. Because this is essentially an extremely rare and very unusual object that first of all can help us answer questions about dark matter, at least in one of these lenses.
And that's because by comparing how light bends here, scientists can actually work out how much mass and dark matter is present in each of these lenses. But much more importantly, the time delay between these images allow scientists to figure out how fast the universe is expanding. here.
By calculating individual differences in arrival and by comparing this with values for the expansion of the universe, it might lead to additional answers in regards to mysteries of dark energy and the bizarre phenomenon known as the Hubble tension. You can learn about these principles in some of the previous videos in the description. And so, because in this case, the light from this object passes through two different points of space that then warps it in very different ways.
By comparing this to predicted models, it becomes possible to measure everything about these lenses, working out a lot of cosmological parameters all at once. And so once again, for cosmologists, this is probably one of the most important discoveries in the last few decades. An extremely rare landing phenomenon that we'll probably be talking more about once there are some additional discoveries.
But I guess for me personally, it's actually kind of mind-blowing that something like this even exists. Here, as you can see, the light really travels in some super bizarre ways, distorting the reality from distant universe in ways we cannot even imagine. And so, in some sense, a lot of things we see at farway distances potentially look completely different in real life just because of all of these gravitational landing effects from enormous amounts of mass present between the light and us with objects like this reminding us how completely bizarre the universe really is.
But we'll probably come back and talk more about the subject once the scientists discover something else about it just because this paper is very recent and nobody has done any follow-ups just yet. And so until those future studies, thank you for watching. Subscribe, share this with someone who was learning about space in the sciences.
Come back tomorrow to learn something else. Support this channel on Patreon by joining a channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description. Stay wonderful.
I'll see you tomorrow. And as always, bye-bye. [Music] [Music] All right.
