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Cosmic Gravitational Lensing Reveals Ancient Galaxies
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Cosmic Gravitational Lensing Reveals Ancient Galaxies
Massive galaxies acting as lenses have revealed five ancient galaxies behind the lensing galaxies. Hundreds more old galaxies should be discovered this way. Steve Mirsky reports
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Five very old galaxies are now known to astrophysicists, thanks to Albert Einstein. A century ago, Einstein predicted an effect called cosmic gravitational lensing. Picture a massive galaxy out in space. From our vantage point, a second galaxy happens to be behind the first galaxy. That second galaxy should be hidden to us. Except that the nearer galaxy bends the light of the far galaxy coming our way. That light can sometimes become so distorted that it actually appears to ring the nearer galaxy. It’s called an Einstein ring, because he predicted that, too.
In the new study, researchers used the Herschel Space Observatory. The brightest spots on their sky map all turned out to be gravitationally magnified galaxies. The study is in the journal Science. [Mattia Negrello et al., "The Detection of a Population of Submillimeter-Bright, Strongly Lensed Galaxies"]
The observatory is really detecting infrared info, or heat, rather than visible light from the newly discovered galaxies. That radiation started coming our way when the universe was only two to four billion years old, less than a third of its current age. Researchers expect to find hundreds of new, old galaxies this way, along with new info about the early universe.
—Steve Mirsky
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
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Open records office on court ruling: Agencies can't charge 'labor fees'
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Open records office on court ruling: Agencies can't charge 'labor fees'
York, PA - Open records advocates are praising a state appeals court ruling that they say ensures citizens won't be excessively charged to receive government records.
A panel of three Commonwealth Court justices ruled that the State Employees Retirement System cannot recover the cost of employees' labor in creating documents tailored to specific requests because the same information was available -- in a less organized and less convenient form -- in records that already existed.
The law allows agencies to recover copying charges -- 25 cents a page is the recommended maximum -- and expenses "necessarily incurred" in responding to records requests.
"You cannot, in essence, charge labor fees," said Terry
Mutchler, the executive director of Pennsylvania's Office of Open Records.
That's the way the office has interpreted the law since it was overhauled in 2009, Mutchler said, and this ruling backs that up.
More than 90 percent of people who request records are members of the public, Mutchler said, and many of them are making one-time requests. High fees can be a deterrent to people requesting records they have a legal right to see, Mutchler said.
SERS spokesman Robert Gentzel said its employees created a computer program to run a more efficient search in this case, which took time, which is why they charged.
"We clearly believe that what we're doing is permitted by the law," he said, adding that he does not know if the agency
will appeal.
Lawmakers should eventually clarify the law to make it clear when government agencies can and cannot charge citizens for research, said Kim de Bourbon, executive director of the Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition.
For example, de Bourbon said, if a person requests copies of a blueprint and an agency doesn't have a blueprint copier, it would make sense for the citizen to pay the agency's extra copying fees.
But, de Bourbon said, finding routine public records is
not extra work for state agencies, it's part of their work, and should not be costly.
That some agencies are looking to charge research fees shows how cash-strapped some are, Mutchler said.
"Of course we don't think open records are the place to (recoup that money)," Mutchler said.Read more at www.ydr.com
-- The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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