Lensed

Zooming in to supernova Zwicky: starting from a small portion of the Palomar ZTF camera, one out of 64 “quadrants”, each one containing tens of thousands of stars and galaxies, the zoom-in takes us to detailed explorations carried out with the larger and sharper VLT and Keck telescopes in Chile and Hawai’i respectively. On the best resolved Keck images, the four nearly identical “copies” of supernova Zwicky can be seen. The multiple images arise due to the warping of space caused by a foreground galaxy, also seen in the…

Researchers just studied the lensing of the oldest light we can see and discovered the oldest dark matter yet observed, surrounding 12-billion-year-old galaxies.They spotted this dark matter by looking at how some galaxies warp the light of the cosmic microwave background, the earliest detectable radiation from just after the Big Bang, which kicked off the universe as we know it. The team’s research is published in Physical Review Letters.“Most researchers use source galaxies to measure dark matter distribution from the…