Gravitational lensing

The James Webb Space Telescope may have been touted a successor to Hubble, but the old-timer still has some life left in it. These two iconic instruments have now teamed up to take a deep-field image of the colorful “Christmas Tree galaxy cluster.”

Astronomers have discovered evidence of a theorized type of black hole lurking in the distant universe. Known as an “Outsize Black Hole,” this object could help explain some fundamental cosmic mysteries, including how supermassive monsters form.

Scientists have manipulated light as though it was being influenced by gravity. By carefully distorting a photonic crystal, the team was able to invoke “pseudogravity” to bend a beam of light, which could have useful applications in optics systems.

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted complex organic molecules, which usually form in smoke, in the very distant universe. With help from a galactic gravitational anomaly, the telescope could see the molecules from 12 billion light-years away.

If you’ve seen the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope this week, you might have heard the term “gravitational lensing” being thrown around. But what does it mean exactly? And how can it help this new telescope make discoveries?

Astronomers believe they’ve detected the first “rogue” black hole, roaming the galaxy alone. The object made itself known when it passed in front of a background star, bending the light with its extreme gravity.

While almost every planet ever found orbits a star, there are some loners that roam the cosmos entirely on their own. Now astronomers have spotted the smallest of these “rogue planets” ever discovered, which is only the size of Earth or smaller.

Large clouds of dark matter have been indirectly detected before, but it should also form smaller clumps. Now Hubble observations have detected evidence of these small clumps for the first time, lending weight to a prevailing dark matter hypothesis.

The Sun is a mere 10-watt bulb compared to quasars, extremely luminous galactic cores that shine so intensely thanks to their ravenous hunger for nearby material. Now, astronomers have detected the brightest quasar ever found, shining with the light of almost 600 trillion Suns.

Thanks to a rare cosmic alignment, astronomers have been able to view the most distant individual normal star ever observed. Located some 9 billion light years from Earth, the star was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope thanks to gravitational lensing amplifying the star’s feeble glow​.

As of January 2018, well over 3,500 exoplanets have been confirmed in the Milky Way, and it was basically a given that planets were pretty common across the universe. Now astrophysicists from the University of Oklahoma (OU) have confirmed the first detection of extragalactic exoplanets.

Gravity from huge objects like stars can curve spacetime, bending light from its straight path. This can alter how we see distant stars through what's called gravitational lensing, and now astronomers have seen it in action, directly observing a star bend the light of another, more distant star.