Gravitational Lensing
Gravity Really Tangled up the Light From a Distant Quasar
Way back in 1979, astronomers spotted two nearly identical quasars that seemed close to each other in the sky. These…
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…
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…
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?…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…