QUETTA – Pakistani astronomers have captured a gravitational lensing object in what is said to be a rare achievement in astronomy.
A blog shared by Taqwa Space Observatory revealed that a member of their team Shaheer Niazi captured a group of galaxies nicknamed the Cheshire Cat and that from the earth, as only four or five astronomers captured so far this galaxy from land while Space Telescopes like Hubble defined it in detail.
Speaking about his latest achievement with a local news outlet, Shaheer said, it took him more than 17 hours to capture the rare sight which according to him was too dim to be detected by a high telescope.
He called it a milestone, by pushing the limits of the country’s first ever high-tech space observatory located in Bela, Balochistan.
In its blog, Taqwa Space Observatory called it the rarest of the rare and an extremely challenging object to capture citing its gravitational arcs. On these gravitational arcs, only a few photons hit camera sensors in a minute.
It further mentioned that the lensed galaxies in the group have redshifts of z>2 which puts them at a distance of more than 10 billion light years away, drawing a comparison with Hubble Space Telescope — the largest and most versatile astronomical observatory.
Borrowing the words from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, it suggested that gravity bends space-time, so if the light would travel across a region with intense gravity, it would bend along the space-time.
