In the Dark

Many people seem to think that astronomers spend all their time looking at pretty pictures of stars and galaxies. Actually a large part of observational astronomy isn’t about making images of things but doing spectroscopy. In fact the rise of astronomical spectroscopy is what turned astronomy into astrophysics. But that’s not to say that spectra can’t be pretty either. Here is an example (from here) which shows the light from the quasar HE0940-1050 taken by the UVES instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

This quasar is an interesting object, at a redshift of z= 3.0932 (which converts to a look-back time of about 11.6 billion years). The dark bands and lines you can see in the spectrum are caused by absorption of the light from the quasar by clouds of hydrogen gas between the quasar and the observer; the strength of the absorption indicates how much gas the light from the quasar has travelled through.  The absorption occurs at a particular wavelength corresponding to the Lyman-α transition but, because the clouds are all at different redshifts, each produces a line at a different observed wavelength in the quasar spectrum. There are many lines, which is why the collection of clouds responsible for them is often called the Lyman-α Forest. In effect the quasar sample is very much like a core sample, as if we were able to drill back in time to the quasar through the material that lies along the line of sight.

This spectrum is particularly remarkable because of the number of faint lines that can be seen: it’s like a detailed DNA Fingerprint of cosmic structure. It’s also very pretty.

This entry was posted on December 5, 2016 at 4:50 pm and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags Absorption, ESO, HE0940-1050, Lyman-alpha absorption, quasar, UVES, Very Large Telescope. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.