Eye Of Sauron - Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Southampton, and the Kyoto Sangyo University have reportedly found another way to make it less difficult to measure distances between heavenly bodies. The new and easier method is because of the "Eye of Sauron" measurements.
As of the current moment, the most known common method known to measure distances is relative.
The "Eye of Sauron" is officially known as NGC 4151. The nickname stuck because it closely resembled the Great Eye from the book and film series "The Lord of the Rings." The "Eye of Sauron" is a modest spiral galaxy estimated to be 13 to 95 million light-years away from Earth.
Researchers were able to narrow down the galaxy's distance to a more-accurate 62 million light-years through the help of the twin telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, reports Tech Times.
The "Eye of Sauron" has a supermassive black hole at its centre and this black hole is still active. It accretes gas clouds from its surroundings and the process that makes it possible to measure the distances to the galaxy.
Scientists led by Dr Sebastian Hoenig from the University of Southampton, have developed a new way of measuring precise distances to galaxies tens of millions of light years away, using the W. M. Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, according to Science Daily.
The new accurate distance measurements from the "Eye of Sauron" could reportedly become the most accurate way to measure the "Hubble's constant", that is, the rate at which the universe is expanding and which ultimately determines the age of the universe, according to Phys.org.
"When the gas falls in towards the black hole, it is heated up and emits ultraviolet radiation. The ultraviolet radiation heats a ring of dust, which orbits the black hole at a large distance and this heats the dust causing it to emit infrared radiation."
"Using telescopes on Earth, we can now measure the time delay between the ultraviolet light from the black hole and the subsequent infrared radiation emitted from the dust cloud," according to Darach Watson, associate professor at the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.
"The time difference is about 30 days and because we know the speed of light, we can calculate the real physical distance between the black hole and the encircling dust," Watson added.
The time difference recorded between the black hole's ultraviolet light and the infrared radiation from the dust ring is around 30 days. Adding in the speed of light, the researchers were then able to calculate for the distance between the black hole and the dust ring, and were eventually able to determine the exact distance between NGC 4151, or the "Eye of Sauron" and the Earth.
"One of the key findings is that the distance determined in this new fashion is quite precise - with 90 percent accuracy. In fact, this method, based on simple geometrical principles, gives the most precise distances for remote galaxies. Moreover, it can be readily used on many more sources than current methods," said Dr. Sebastian Hoenig the study's lead author from the University of Southampton.
With the new "Eye of Sauron" technique that Hoenig and his team came up with, it has become possible to measure distance between the Earth and about 10 percent of the active galaxies in the universe. This reportedly means that being able to measure distances farther than the supernovas proves that the universe is expanding as well as accelerating.
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