Let's turn the sun into a telescope. In fact, we don't have to do any work—we just have to be in the right spot. But how can the sun be a telescope? The sun is not a mirror, but it is a lens. And we ...

The Hubble Space Telescope is a constant source of beautiful pictures of the wonders of space, and this week’s Hubble image shows a wonderful example of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, ...

Periodically, the European Space Agency (ESA) releases images that provide breathtaking views of the cosmos, courtesy of its premier missions. This includes a relative newcomer to party with the ...

Anyone who has ever measured something twice, like the width of a doorway, and gotten two different answers knows how annoying it can be. Now imagine you’re a physicist, and what you’re measuring ...

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the US National Science Foundation and US Department of Energy's Office of Science, will add an unprecedented amount of cosmological data to the study of ...

A galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light-years away is bending space and glowing with free-floating stars — and its core mass is ...

From a serendipitous discovery made with LBT, a team of astronomers led by Arjen van der Wel from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has found the most distant gravitational lens yet — a ...

Gravitational lenses are cosmic phenomena that radically distort light passing by, make objects behind the lens appear much brighter, and help astronomers see distant parts of the universe. And now we ...

Clumps and clusters of galaxies exhibit gravitational effects on the light-and-matter behind them due to the effects of weak gravitational lensing. In addition, arcs, multiple images of the same ...

GAL-CLUS-022058s is one of the largest and most complete Einstein rings ever discovered. This beautiful gravitational lens is created by a bright, distant galaxy which happens to be aligned directly ...