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Hubble gallery of gravitational lenses tees up Roman follow-up
NASA said Nov. 12 that Hubble images of gravitational lenses will help model dark matter and train searches for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
NASA’s Hubble team on Nov. 12 released a gallery of gravitational lenses as a sampler for follow-up by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope1.
Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive foreground galaxy or cluster bends and magnifies light from a more distant background object, producing arcs, Einstein rings, or multiple images1. Astronomers use the amount of distortion to estimate how much mass, including dark matter, sits in the foreground system1.
Hubble images mainly in visible and ultraviolet light with some infrared, at high resolution on individual objects, while Roman is designed to see primarily infrared light over a much larger field of view1. NASA said Hubble is better for individual lenses and Roman should find more of them; unusual Roman finds could return to Hubble for visible and ultraviolet follow-up1.
With Hubble’s resolution, researchers hope to spot small imperfections in the lensed arcs that would mark dark-matter clumps of about a million to a billion solar masses, a prediction of the cold dark matter theory1. The Milky Way’s dark-matter halo is about 1.3 trillion solar masses, NASA said1.
The team also intends to use the Hubble images to build a search tool for similar arcs in Roman data1. The lenses were first found with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument at Kitt Peak, then observed by Hubble, with Roman planned next1.
The gallery includes an arc-counterarc pair, an Einstein ring, quadruply lensed galaxies, and a rare dust lane in a foreground galaxy that may interrupt a ring; NASA said Roman’s infrared view could show whether that ring is more complete1. Blue arcs are described as younger stars and red arcs as older ones, a difference both telescopes are expected to study1.