Researchers have made the "first-ever gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens."
The lens is a "natural telescope" that forms when the perfect alignment causes gravity from a space object to "bend and amplify light from a more distant source", a NASA news release reported.
The accomplishment could lead to even more impressive feats in the future, such as looking at emission zones around black holes. The researchers also hope to discover another gravitational lens using data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
"We began thinking about the possibility of making this observation a couple of years after Fermi launched, and all of the pieces finally came together in late 2012," Teddy Cheung, lead scientist for the finding and an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, said in the news release.
In September researchers noticed bright gamma ray flares coming from a source called B0218+357 located 4.35 billion light-years away. These flares allowed researchers to make the measurements. B0218+357 is a blazer, a galaxy known for "intense emissions and unpredictable behavior.
"At the blazar's heart is a supersized black hole with a mass millions to billions of times that of the sun. As matter spirals toward the black hole, some of it blasts outward as jets of particles traveling near the speed of light in opposite directions," the news release reported.
This phenomenon causes one jet to line up with the Earth, allowing researchers to look down it. Before the jet reaches us it passes to a galaxy similar to the Milky Way about four billion light-years away; the galaxy splits the into different paths which causes the researchers to see "dual images."
"One light path is slightly longer than the other, so when we detect flares in one image we can try to catch them days later when they replay in the other image," team member Jeff Scargle, an astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif, said in the news release.
When the object was discovered, the gamma ray bursts were the brightest outside of the Milky Way. The researchers observed three episodes of the flares with a playback delay of 11.46 days.
"Over the course of a day, one of these flares can brighten the blazar by 10 times in gamma rays but only 10 percent in visible light and radio, which tells us that the region emitting gamma rays is very small compared to those emitting at lower energies," team member Stefan Larsson, an astrophysicist at Stockholm University in Sweden said.
"As a result, the gravity of small concentrations of matter in the lensing galaxy may deflect and amplify gamma rays more significantly than lower-energy light. Disentangling these so-called microlensing effects poses a challenge to taking further advantage of high-energy lens observations," the news release reported.
The team hopes that by lookign at additional lens systems they will gain insight into the nature of black holes and how the universe expands.
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