Gravitational Lensing

A Rogue Earth and Neptune Might Have Been Found in Older Data

Scientists have found what appear to be rogue planets hidden in old survey data. Their results are starting to define…

2 days ago

A Novel Propulsion System Would Hurl Hypervelocity Pellets at a Spacecraft to Speed it up

A new proposal for a pellet-beam spacecraft could enable interstellar missions and a Solar Gravitational Lens in a matter of…

2 months ago

In a New Hubble Image, Dark Matter Anchors the Giant Galaxy Cluster Abell 611

Dark matter. It's secret. It's dark because it doesn't give off any light. We can't see it, taste it, touch…

5 months ago

Webb and Hubble Work Together to Reveal This Spectacular Galaxy Pair — and Several Bonuses!

What’s better than a pair of galaxies observed by a pair of iconic space telescopes? The answer to that, according…

6 months ago

A Computer Algorithm is 88% Accurate in Finding Gravitational Lenses

Astronomers have been assessing a new machine learning algorithm to determine how reliable it is for finding gravitational lenses hidden…

6 months ago

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…

6 months ago

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…

8 months ago

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…

8 months ago

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?…

9 months ago

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…

10 months ago