Gravitational Lensing

Hubble Sees a Mirror Image of the Same Galaxy Thanks to Gravitational Lensing

It's been an amazing couple of weeks for fans of gravitational lensing. JWST grabbed the headlines with a spectacular infrared…

2 years ago

A Mission to Reach the Solar Gravitational Lens in 30 Years

NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts is famous for supporting outlandish ideas in the astronomy and space exploration fields. Since being…

2 years ago

Using the Sun as a Gravitational Lens Would Let Us See Exoplanets With Incredible Resolution

Have you ever seen wispy arcs and rings in astronomical images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories?…

2 years ago

Hubble Pins Down the Mass of a Potential Free-Floating Black Hole That’s 5,000 Light-Years Away

Earlier this year, astronomers used microlensing and the Hubble Space Telescope to detect, for the first time, a rogue black…

2 years ago

We can Probably Find Supernovae Enhanced by Gravitational Lensing, We Just Need to Look

Gravitational lensing provides an opportunity to see supernovae and other transients much farther than we normally can. A new research…

3 years ago

A Gravitational Lens Shows the Same Galaxy Three Times

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope are often mind-bending in both their beauty and wealth of scientific wonder. And sometimes,…

3 years ago

What a Perfect Gravitational Lens

A stunning new photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a nearly perfect Einstein Ring, an effect caused by gravitational…

3 years ago

Gaia Finds 12 Examples of Einstein Crosses; Galaxies Being Gravitationally Lensed so we see Them Repeated 4 Times

After examining data from the Gaia Observatory, a team of researchers found 12 more examples of the rare phenomenon known…

4 years ago

Dark Energy Survey Finds Hundreds of New Gravitational Lenses

It’s relatively rare for a magical object from fantasy stories to have a analog in real life.  A truly functional…

4 years ago

If We Used the Sun as a Gravitational Lens Telescope, This is What a Planet at Proxima Centauri Would Look Like

A recent study shows how the Sun could be used as a gravitational lens to take direct images of nearby…

4 years ago