Extremely distant galaxies are usually too faint to be seen, even by the largest telescopes. But nature has a solution: gravitational lensing, predicted by Albert Einstein and observed many times by astronomers. However recently, an international team of astronomers, led by Harald Ebeling of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, discovered one of the most extreme instances of magnification by gravitational lensing.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope to survey a sample of huge clusters of galaxies, the team found a distant galaxy, eMACSJ1341-QG-1, that is magnified 30 times thanks to the distortion of space-time created by the massive galaxy cluster dubbed eMACSJ1341.9-2441. (1)
Everything we see is distorted in one or the other way.
Light passing through fields, light passing through matter or dark matter, through water or air, through lenses, through your very… eyes! No, you can never be certain that what you see is real. Look without prejudice and you will see, that the only thing you can be certain of is that you cannot see!
Look at that coffee cup.
There is no coffee.
Only molecules of coffee.
But you are smelling coffee.
Wishing coffee.
Because you have a hard time waking up.
And you have to go to work even though you don’t want to.
It is your life that you are experiencing.
Not just a cup of coffee.
But sure.
You can just say “I see coffee”.
