April 12th, 2021, 9:32AM / BY Samantha Thompson
Vera Rubin and Kent Ford (white hat) setting up their image tube spectrograph at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. (Photo: THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE)
In March 2020, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory sat partially erected, perched on Chile’s Cerro Pachón in the foothills of the Andes Mountains. The Observatory had halted construction of the 8.4-meter telescope and its associated buildings due to the coronavirus pandemic. By October 2020, with safety precautions in place, construction teams began to slowly return to the mountain. Earlier this month, just one year after its unexpected closure, the Rubin Observatory reached a major milestone when crew used a crane to lower the top end of the telescope, weighing approximately 28 tons and measuring 10 meters in diameter, through the observatory’s open dome and into its place on the telescope. This was one of the last remaining heavy pieces to be
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IMAGE: Four of the newfound quadruply imaged quasars are shown here: From top left and moving clockwise, the objects are: GraL J1537-3010 or Wolf s Paw; GraL J0659+1629 or Gemini s Crossbow; GraL. view more
Credit: The GraL Collaboration
With the help of machine-learning techniques, a team of astronomers has discovered a dozen quasars that have been warped by a naturally occurring cosmic lens and split into four similar images. Quasars are extremely luminous cores of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes.
Over the past four decades, astronomers had found about 50 of these quadruply imaged quasars, or quads for short, which occur when the gravity of a massive galaxy that happens to sit in front of a quasar splits its single image into four. The latest study, which spanned only a year and a half, increases the number of known quads by about 25 percent and demonstrates the power of machine learning to assist astronomers in the
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Machine-learning methods lead to discovery of rare “quadruply imaged quasars” that can help solve cosmological puzzles
With the help of machine-learning techniques, a team of astronomers has discovered a dozen quasars that have been warped by a naturally occurring cosmic “lens” and split into four similar images. Quasars are extremely luminous cores of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes.
Over the past four decades, astronomers had found about 50 of these “quadruply imaged quasars,” or quads for short, which occur when the gravity of a massive galaxy that happens to sit in front of a quasar splits its single image into four. The latest study, which spanned only a year and a half, increases the number of known quads by about 25 percent and demonstrates the power of machine learning to assist astronomers in their search for these cosmic oddities.
Date Time
Seeing Quadruple
With the help of machine-learning techniques, a team of astronomers has discovered a dozen quasars that have been warped by a naturally occurring cosmic “lens” and split into four similar images. Quasars are extremely luminous cores of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes.
Over the past four decades, astronomers had found about 50 of these “quadruply imaged quasars,” or quads for short, which occur when the gravity of a massive galaxy that happens to sit in front of a quasar splits its single image into four. The latest study, which spanned only a year and a half, increases the number of known quads by about 25 percent and demonstrates the power of machine learning to assist astronomers in their search for these cosmic oddities.