El Nino weakening doesn't mean cooler temperatures this summer, forecasters say
As Canadians brace themselves for summer temperatures, forecasters say a weakening El Nino cycle doesn’t mean relief from the heat.
In 2020, the Hubble Space Telescope captured a rare and spectacular image of light from a far-away galaxy curving in a glowing arc around a cluster of dense gravity -- and now, new analysis has revealed that this light travelled 9.4 billion light-years to reach us.
The deep-space phenomenon is called an “Einstein ring,” and the image captured by Hubble last winter is one of the largest and most complete such rings ever seen, nicknamed the “Molten Ring.”
Jesse Rogerson, assistant professor of astronomy at York University, told CTV News Channel on Sunday that these light shows are more than just a sight to behold as they allow us to peer farther through space and time.
“A consequence of general relativity, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, is that mass, gravity, can bend light,” he explained. “If everything gets lined up properly, something that’s really, really far away, if it’s behind a massive object, light can get bent around that massive object towards us so that we can see it.
“And even more importantly, it gets magnified. It gets brightened. Which means we can see things way across the universe that we normally wouldn’t ever be able to see.”
The effect that produces the curved shape of these rings is called gravitational lensing. If you peer closely enough at the Hubble image, you can see that the galaxy’s light has been distorted in a way that produces duplicated images of the galaxy along the golden arc.
After the image of the Molten Ring’s original publication, scientists dug back through the data to understand just what they were looking at, with the results described in a paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal.
They found the galaxy that was having its light bent into this curve was 9.4 billion light-years away from Earth, which means that we are seeing it at a younger age than the galaxies closer to us.
“The cool consequence about light travelling through the universe is that the further away we look, the further back in time we’re looking,” Rogerson explained.
“Which means when you see a galaxy really, really far away, you’re seeing a galaxy that existed at an earlier point in the universe’s timeline.”
The image captured of this galaxy shows it as it appeared when the universe was less than half the age it is now, according to a Hubble news release. At that time, it was going through an explosive period of star formation.
“They found that the star formation rate was about a thousand times higher in that galaxy […] than our galaxy today,” Rogerson said.
To come to these conclusions, researchers looked not only at the Hubble image, but also archival data relating to this specific galaxy -- collected by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope -- in order to determine the redshift value of the galaxy. The redshift value refers to looking at specific wavelengths of light to determine whether an object in space is moving towards or away from us.
“The detection of molecular gas, of which new stars are born, allowed us to calculate the precise redshift and thus gives us confidence that we are truly looking at a very distant galaxy," Nikolaus Sulzenauer, PhD student at the Max Plank Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany and member of the investigation team, said in a press release from the European Space Agency (ESA).
The unique thing about Einstein’s rings is that the magnification can allow researchers to see galaxies in higher detail than they would’ve been able to otherwise.
NASA and ESA explained in a release that the galaxy’s light had been magnified by a factor of 20. Essentially, the Einstein’s ring boosted Hubble’s viewing capability to that of a 48-metre-aperture telescope. According to the ESA -- which collaborates with NASA on the Hubble project -- “this is larger than the currently planned extremely large telescopes.”
“The universe, nature, is magnifying a really distant galaxy for us, which is incredible to see,” Rogerson said.
The foreground object that is distorting the light from the distant galaxy is believed to be an enormous cluster of galaxies.
Rogerson said one of the questions astronomers and scientists have when they look at galaxies closer to us is how those galaxies grew to their size.
“How do you get the Andromeda galaxy, how do you get M-87, how do you get these big huge galaxies?” he said.
Because of the magnifying effect of Einstein rings, researchers can see what galaxies looked like in their infancy.
“I love Einstein rings, it’s one of my favourite things in astronomy because it’s an example of nature really working for us,” Rogerson said. "Because nature doesn’t always make it so easy to learn things, but this is an example where nature does a lot of the heavy lifting.”
As Canadians brace themselves for summer temperatures, forecasters say a weakening El Nino cycle doesn’t mean relief from the heat.
A 15-year old boy who was critically injured after a stabbing in Nepean on Thursday has died of his injuries, Ottawa's English public school board said Sunday.
Police say it’s fortunate no one was injured or killed in a collision at North Vancouver’s Park and Tilford shopping centre Saturday evening that sent one vehicle careening into a flower shop and another into a set of concrete barriers outside a Winners store.
The Maple Leafs battled back from a 3-1 series deficit against the Boston Bruins with consecutive 2-1 victories - including one that required extra time - in their first-round playoff series to push the club's Original Six rival to the limit before suffering a devastating Game 7 overtime loss.
Amid scientists' warnings that nations need to transition away from fossil fuels to limit climate change, Canadians are still lukewarm on electric vehicles, according to a study conducted by Nanos Research for CTV News.
Three people have died and two have been hospitalized after a speeding car struck a tree and landed on another vehicle in Fredericton Sunday morning.
A Montreal man is warning Tesla drivers about using the Smart Summon feature after his vehicle hit another in a parking lot.
Madonna put on a free concert on Copacabana beach Saturday night, turning Rio de Janeiro's vast stretch of sand into an enormous dance floor teeming with a multitude of her fans.
Thieves killed two Australians and an American on a surfing trip to Mexico in order to steal their truck, particularly because they wanted the tires, authorities said Sunday.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.