Space is awfully psychedelic.
There are objects in the universe so massive — often clusters of galaxies — that they warp space, like a bowling ball sitting on a mattress. This creates a curved cosmic lens. “Light follows that bend instead of traveling in a straight line, distorting and brightening what’s behind the object,” NASA explains.
A new image snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope, the powerful observatory orbiting 1 million miles from Earth, shows a galaxy warped by this effect — which is technically called “gravitational lensing” and was long ago predicted by Albert Einstein.
The Webb image below shows a sea of galaxies, some spiraled like our Milky Way. Near center-right is the warped and stretched galaxy MRG-M0138, which is located some 10 billion light-years away. This is an exceptionally old, distant galaxy, but the natural cosmic lens has magnified the light, making it appear vivid.
And in this magnified light, there’s a surprise.
The close-up of the stretched galaxy reveals bright light from an exploded star, a violent event called a supernova. The researchers call it “Supernova Encore,” and the giant gravitational lens makes it appear multiple times in this image, which you can see designated by the circles below.
What’s more, the astronomers expect the lens to reveal yet another copy of this same supernova in the 2030s. This will allow astronomers a rare, invaluable chance to measure how fast the universe is expanding.
“When a supernova explodes behind a gravitational lens, its light reaches Earth by several different paths. We can compare these paths to several trains that leave a station at the same time, all traveling at the same speed and bound for the same location. Each train takes a different route, and because of the differences in trip length and terrain, the trains do not arrive at their destination at the same time,” Justin Pierel, a NASA Einstein Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Andrew Newman, an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, explained in a NASA statement.
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