Webb telescope: Bending galaxies and histories

Werner Salinger is one of the few people still living who can recall talking to and being with Albert Einstein.

"He loved—just loved—being with kids. I was just a kid to him, you know," says Salinger.

Salinger is now 92 years old. Born in Berlin, he survived the Holocaust when he and his parents fled Germany in 1939. But their escape would take the life of his mother, who contracted tuberculosis on their ship voyage to New York. A year later, he was living in Princeton, New Jersey. Salinger's grandmother was a friend of Frau Helen Dukas, Einstein's secretary. When she would visit Princeton, Salinger's grandmother would walk Werner down Mercer Street to the house where Einstein lived and worked. It was the early 1940's. World War Two. Einstein himself had already fled Nazi Germany for the United States and Princeton years before the Salingers.

"He would take me by the hand and walk me through his garden," Salinger says, "then back to his study, where he had a violin up on the wall. And he would take the violin down and play it for me." Salinger could not have known it then, but this was also a time when Einstein was doing important work about physics, gravity, time and relativity.

Distant gravitationally-lensing clusters is a mouthful. In its simplest form, it just means that the gravitational pull of galaxies can be powerful enough to bend light shining from objects behind them. "These would be able to magnify and curve the image of galaxies behind the cluster," says ASU Regents Professor Rogier Windhorst. Windhorst was born in 1955—the same year Einstein died. But Einstein—both the man, and his ideas—are now the connection between Salinger and Windhorst. The two happened to meet recently while speaking to a high school assembly. Salinger, who lives in Gold Canyon Arizona, was there to speak to students about the Holocaust. Windhorst came to speak about astrophysics. Einstein plays a role in the lives of both men.

Windhorst is among the leading scientists unraveling the science behind the stunning images coming from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. It's work which draws on Einstein's ideas. So Windhorst recently invited Salinger to view large, new prints of some of the most impressive galaxies and clusters, including shots which show the gravitational lensing Einstein anticipated. The strange effect can help scientists. "Einstein predicted that these clusters would be able to magnify and curve images of galaxies behind the clusters," says Windhorst. "Einstein got it exactly right in his prediction, but he doubted that it could ever be observed." Salinger, Windhorst and the rest of the world are now seeing some of what Einstein thought would never be seen. "The way that these clusters of galaxies modify the images of the distant objects is just out of this world," says Windhorst. "They get literally 'spagettified' into strings, and pencils and weird looking things." One of the strangest is "El Anzuelo"—"the Fish Hook"—an image of a bright orange galaxy pulled into a horseshoe shape by the Einstein's gravitational lensing.

ASU postdoctoral researcher Patrick Kamieneski is on Windhorst's Webb Telescope science team. He has used computational software to undo the bending and render what this galaxy looks like without the effects of gravity.

"It gets all distorted, and we have to account for that," says Kamieneski. "But when we do that, we can see the background object (in this case "El Anzuelo") at even higher resolution than Webb can give us, even on its own." "I call it Einstein's fish hook," says Windhorst. He and the Webb Telescope team from the university's School of Earth and Space Exploration shared explanations with Salinger about what is going on in the images. "I think it's fair to say we were showing Werner Salinger what was in Einstein's head when he met Einstein in the 1940's, in Princeton," he adds. "Einstein never lived to see these images, but he knew his theory was right. Werner was amazed to see these pictures. Einstein never got to see it, but Werner Salinger did."

Provided by Arizona State University