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Significant Findings

FALSE ALARMS

A number of alleged gravitational Lensing galaxies are most likely FALSE ALARMS due to the forward scattering of intense light coming from the said galaxies by the vast quantity of the intervening intergalactic matter. The intense light from the foreground galactic clusters, falsely claimed to be gravitational lenses, is forward scattered by the intervening matter only be observed using advanced light sensitive tools of modern astronomy.

TOOLS USED BY THE MODERN ASTRONOMY

The Faint Object Camera (FOC) is designed to amplify the light from the faintest objects in the universe. The modern cameras are design for very high resolution and to record images on extremely sensitive electronic light detectors called Charge-Coupled Devices (CCD's). The camera commonly use state-of-the-art image intensifier devices, i.e., light amplifiers capable of amplifying the faintest bits of light from the most remote objects to be as much as 100,000 times brighter than the original un-amplified light.

FALSE ALARMS

the forward scattering of

INTENSE LIGHT

Abell 2218

The thin curved arcs, shown here surrounding the bright galaxy cluster, are typically shown and illustrated in practically all Astronomy magazines and textbooks. These images are the magnified images of distant galaxies that have been allegedly magnified or gravitationally lensed by the powerful gravity of the galaxy cluster Abell 2218.

NASA/ESA

It is well known that the electromagnetic radiation, in particularly the IR, optical and UV wavelengths of intense light from the nearby stars and galaxies are scattered by the interstellar and intergalactic grains of dust. The angular distribution and the polarization of the scattered light is intensely studied and are tabulated for their various signatures as a function of wavelength, the grain size in micrometers and their distributions. The Abell 2218 galaxy cluster may be a prime example of forward scattering of the intense light from a compact light source revealing curved arcs simply to be amplified by the light sensitive tools of modern Astronomy. This feature is clearly repeated as seen in the Galaxy Cluster 0024+1654. A clear fact is there is virtually no region in interstellar and intergalactic space that is free of light scattering cosmic dust.

Galaxy Cluster 0024+1654

Magnified images of distant galaxies that have been allegedly gravitationally lensed by the gravity of the galaxy cluster 0024+1654.

Galaxy Cluster 0024+1654, W.N. Colley (Princeton University), E. Turner (Princeton University), J.A. Tyson (AT&T Bell Labs) and NASA

Abell 1689

Taken with Advanced Camera for Surveys on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Allegedly, faraway galaxies appear in the Hubble image as arc-shaped objects around the cluster Abell 1689 and are magnified "zoom lensed" by gravitational lensing.

NASA; ESA; Bradley (Johns Hopkins University); Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz); Ford (Johns Hopkins University); Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Abell 370

NASA, ESA, Hubble SM4 ERO Team, ST-ECF, September 9th, 2009

A close-up Abell 370, nearly 5 billion light-years away, is alleged to have been gravitationally lensed, where the warping of space by the cluster's gravitational field distorts the light from galaxies lying far behind it. This is manifested as arcs and streaks in the picture, which are the stretched images of background galaxies.

Abell 383

Abell 383, alleged to be a gravitational lens, was used to find a galaxy so far away that we see it as it was less than a billion years after the Big Bang. This distant galaxy's light has been warped into two, very faint images that are hard to see in this view.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CRAL, LAM, STScI

The galaxy cluster Abell 383 clearly shows evidence of a forward scattering of the intense light from the compact light source of the galactic core, generating apparent curved arcs encircling the nearly point-like light source at the galactic core simply to be amplified by the light sensitive CCD's of the modern astronomical observatories.

Galaxy Cluster RCS2 032727-132623

Allegedly, the background galaxy appears 20 times larger and over three times brighter than typically lensed galaxies.

Hubble Space Telescope, released Feb. 2, 2012, shows distant galaxy 10 billion light-years away through gravitational lens around the galaxy cluster RCS2 032727-132623 about 5 billion light-years away. NASA, ESA

Of all the alleged gravitational lensing galaxies, the one clear fact is that the images all have a wavelength dependency. This is consistent with the fact that there is a clear wavelength dependency on the scattering of the light from the interstellar and intergalactic dust and is a function of the grain size and the distribution of the grains of dust. Viewing these alleged gravitational lensing galaxies in other wavelengths, i.e., using wavelength filters to allow recording of the images in IR or in UV, then these features will all appear to be entirely different, not resembling their usual features. Recall that according to the light bending rule of General Relativity, the gravitational light bending effect should be totally independent of the frequency of the gravitationally bent light ray.

REFERENCES

Li, Aigen. 2009, "Optical Properties of Dust", Springer, Chapter 6, pp. 167-188
Li, Aigen, Drain, B.T., 2002, "Are Silicon Nanoparticles an Interstellar Dust Component?", The Astrophysical Journal, 564, 803
Draine, B.T., 2003, "Scattering by Interstellar Dust Grains. I. Optical and Ultraviolet", The Astrophysical Journal, 598: 1017-1025
Kozasa, T., Blum, J., Okamoto, H., Mukai, T., 1993, "Optical properties of dust Aggregates: II. Angular dependence of scattered light", Astronomy and Astrophysics, 276, 278-288

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