Tag: Galaxy Cluster

Gravitational Lensing and a Supernova Give Insights into Dark Matter

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Even I was blown away when I saw this image a friend sent me.  Gravitational lensing is a rare occurrence, and a supernova is a rare occurrence, so to see a supernova in a gravitationally lensed galaxy deep within the universe is exceptional.  So exceptional that it was spotted for the first time ever in a Hubble image of the distant universe. That dot in the image is a single supernova in a very distant galaxy, split into four images by the gravitational lensing of the galaxy cluster in front of it.  But there is also a secondary lensing effect from...

Just a Little Video of The Entire Universe

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The Universe is big, in case you weren’t aware.  It’s the biggest thing we know of, containing at least 100 Billion Galaxies, each with up to 1 Trillion of their own stars.  It’s ludicrously large. How do we know its so big? A major project completed in 2001 surveyed the Galaxies of the local Universe, and what was found can be summed up in the video below, from Reddit. The data is from the 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), whose goal was to map all the galaxies in the known Universe in Infrared.  The colours in the above map show...