Galaxy cluster Abell S1063 (left) as imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope as part of the Frontier Fields program. The distorted images of the background galaxies are a consequence of the warped space dues to Einstein’s general relativity; the parallel field (right) shows no such effects. Image credit: NASA, ESA and Jennifer Lotz (STScI)

One Incredible Galaxy Cluster Yields Two Types of Gravitational Lenses
By Ethan Siegel

There is this great idea that if you look hard enough and long enough at any region of
space, your line of sight will eventually run into a luminous object: a star, a galaxy or a
cluster of galaxies. In reality, the universe is finite in age, so this isn’t quite the case.
There are objects that emit light from the past 13.7 billion years—99 percent of the age of
the universe—but none before that. Even in theory, there are no stars or galaxies to see
beyond that time, as light is limited by the amount of time it has to travel.
But with the advent of large, powerful space telescopes that can collect data for the
equivalent of millions of seconds of observing time, in both visible light and infrared
wavelengths, we can see nearly to the edge of all that’s accessible to us.
The most massive compact, bound structures in the universe are galaxy clusters that are
hundreds or even thousands of times the mass of the Milky Way. One of them, Abell
S1063, was the target of a recent set of Hubble Space Telescope observations as part of
the Frontier Fields program. While the Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument imaged
the cluster, another instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, used an optical trick to image a
parallel field, offset by just a few arc minutes. Then the technique was reversed, giving us
an unprecedentedly deep view of two closely aligned fields simultaneously, with
wavelengths ranging from 435 to 1600 nanometers.
With a huge, towering galaxy cluster in one field and no comparably massive objects in
the other, the effects of both weak and strong gravitational lensing are readily apparent.
The galaxy cluster—over 100 trillion times the mass of our sun—warps the fabric of
space. This causes background light to bend around it, converging on our eyes another
four billion light years away. From behind the cluster, the light from distant galaxies is
stretched, magnified, distorted, and bent into arcs and multiple images: a classic example
of strong gravitational lensing. But in a subtler fashion, the less optimally aligned
galaxies are distorted as well; they are stretched into elliptical shapes along concentric
circles surrounding the cluster.
A visual inspection yields more of these tangential alignments than radial ones in the
cluster field, while the parallel field exhibits no such shape distortion. This effect, known
as weak gravitational lensing, is a very powerful technique for obtaining galaxy cluster
masses independent of any other conditions. In this serendipitous image, both types of
lensing can be discerned by the naked eye. When the James Webb Space Telescope
NASA Space Place Astronomy Club Article September 2016
launches in 2018, gravitational lensing may well empower us to see all the way back to
the very first stars and galaxies.

A possible super-Earth/mini-Neptune world hundreds of times more distant than Earth is from the Sun. Image credit: R. Hurt / Caltech (IPAC)

By Ethan Siegel

When the advent of large telescopes brought us the discoveries of Uranus and then Neptune, they also brought the great hope of a Solar System even richer in terms of large, massive worlds. While the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt were each found to possess a large number of substantial icy-and-rocky worlds, none of them approached even Earth in size or mass, much less the true giant worlds. Meanwhile, all-sky infrared surveys, sensitive to red dwarfs, brown dwarfs and Jupiter-mass gas giants, were unable to detect anything new that was closer than Proxima Centauri. At the same time, Kepler taught us that super-Earths, planets between Earth and Neptune in size, were the galaxy’s most common, despite our Solar System having none.

The discovery of Sedna in 2003 turned out to be even more groundbreaking than astronomers realized. Although many Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) were discovered beginning in the 1990s, Sedna had properties all the others didn’t. With an extremely eccentric orbit and an aphelion taking it farther from the Sun than any other world known at the time, it represented our first glimpse of the hypothetical Oort cloud: a spherical distribution of bodies ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of A.U. from the Sun. Since the discovery of Sedna, five other long-period, very eccentric TNOs were found prior to 2016 as well. While you’d expect their orbital parameters to be randomly distributed if they occurred by chance, their orbital orientations with respect to the Sun are clustered extremely narrowly: with less than a 1-in-10,000 chance of such an effect appearing randomly.

Whenever we see a new phenomenon with a surprisingly non-random appearance, our scientific intuition calls out for a physical explanation. Astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown provided a compelling possibility earlier this year: perhaps a massive perturbing body very distant from the Sun provided the gravitational “kick” to hurl these objects towards the Sun. A single addition to the Solar System would explain the orbits of all of these long-period TNOs, a planet about 10 times the mass of Earth approximately 200 A.U. from the Sun, referred to as Planet Nine. More Sedna-like TNOs with similarly aligned orbits are predicted, and since January of 2016, another was found, with its orbit aligning perfectly with these predictions.

Ten meter class telescopes like Keck and Subaru, plus NASA’s NEOWISE mission, are currently searching for this hypothetical, massive world. If it exists, it invites the question of its origin: did it form along with our Solar System, or was it captured from another star’s vicinity much more recently? Regardless, if Batygin and Brown are right and this object is real, our Solar System may contain a super-Earth after all.