Gravitational Lensing

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A field filled with distant galaxies. An elliptical galaxy just to the right of image center is surrounded by an Einstein Ring.

Hubble Rings In the New Year

2 min read

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals a tiny patch of sky in the constellation Hydra. The stars and galaxies…

Article7 days ago

Hundreds of overlapping objects at various distances are spread across this field. Galaxies’ colors vary. The majority appear orange, pink, and white, some are shades of orange or blue. Most galaxies appear as fuzzy ovals, but a few have distinctive spiral arms. At the very center is a tiny galaxy nicknamed Firefly Sparkle that looks like a long, angled, dotted line. Smaller companions are nearby.

Found: First Actively Forming Galaxy as Lightweight as Young Milky Way

6 min read

For the first time, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected and “weighed” a galaxy that not only existed around…

Article1 month ago

Amid a field of galaxies, a repeated, elongated red galaxy forms a shape like the top of a question mark, with another galaxy positioned like the question mark’s dot. In each occurrence, another white, clumpy galaxy with an overall circular shape appears perched on top of the red galaxy. A very bright foreground galaxy appears to the right of the bottom curve of the question mark shape. To the lower right, among other galaxies, another occurrence of the galaxy pair appears, unaffiliated with the question mark shape.

NASA’s Webb Reveals Distorted Galaxy Forming Cosmic Question Mark

5 min read

It’s 7 billion years ago, and the universe’s heyday of star formation is beginning to slow. What might our Milky…

Article4 months ago

This animated GIF shows how light is bent by massive objects that create dents in space-time. The first scene shows a white grid on a black background, which represents space-time. In the center is a star shown as a glowing yellow ball. The star creates a dent in the space-time grid, so the lines of the grid are curved under and around it. A line of yellow light comes down from the top of the image and arcs around the star. Then the scene changes to show the Hubble Space Telescope, a silver cylindrical object, in the bottom right of the image, pointed up toward the left. In the upper left is a fuzzy white blob with yellow lines moving toward Hubble. Between them, in the center, is a cluster of galaxies, depicted as several different-sized orange and white specs of light. As the yellow lines approach the galaxy cluster, they bend around it, ending up pointing toward the telescope.

How Gravity Warps Light

5 min read

Gravity is obviously pretty important. It holds your feet down to Earth so you don’t fly away into space, and…

Article2 years ago

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Amendment 103: Delay of Due Date for A.22 NEWS to March 12, 2025

This visualization shows how the ocean circulation in the Amundsen Sea, Antarctica flows around and under the floating ice shelves and glaciers. The ocean flows are colored by temperature with blue indicating colder and red showing warmer currents. This version is in Dome Master format.

Amendment 102: Due Date Delays for Several Astrophysics Programs

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