Gravitational lensing as a research area investigates the deflection, magnification, and distortion of light from distant sources by intervening mass distributions, as predicted by general relativity, and develops methods to use these effects as astrophysical and cosmological probes. It encompasses strong, weak, and microlensing regimes, focusing on reconstructing mass profiles of galaxies and clusters, mapping dark matter, constraining dark energy via lensing statistics and cosmic shear, and testing gravity on large scales. The field integrates theoretical modeling, numerical simulations, and analysis of large imaging and spectroscopic surveys, emphasizing inverse problems, bias control, and statistical inference to extract cosmological parameters and substructure properties.
Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don't know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can ...
Astronomy
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NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is poised to make a major leap in the hunt for worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. Scientists expect the mission to reveal around 100,000 worlds—a staggering leap ...
Astronomy
May 28, 2026
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On the night of 18 December 2019, a star in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, briefly got brighter. Not dramatically nor explosively, just a smooth symmetrical rise and fall in brightness lasting about an ...
Astronomy
May 28, 2026
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Astrophysicists think that black hole masses are hierarchical. The largest are supermassive black holes (SMBH) like the one at the center of the Milky Way and other galaxies. Stellar mass black holes are born of collapsing ...
Astronomy
May 27, 2026
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Look closely at this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and you'll see galaxies of various shapes and sizes clustered together toward the center-left of the image. A few foreground stars shine brightly and are easily ...
Astronomy
May 22, 2026
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We may be more in the dark about dark matter than previously thought, according to a new analysis of distant galaxy clusters. Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan, a leading theorist on the nature of black holes and dark ...
Astronomy
May 14, 2026
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The Milky Way's galactic bulge, the bulbous region that surrounds the galactic center, contains a dense collection of stars, planets, and other free-floating objects. This region has been studied for decades with numerous ...
Astronomy
May 11, 2026
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Astronomers have long known that neutron stars, the crushed cores left behind after massive stars explode, should be scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. However, most of them are effectively invisible. A new study ...
Astronomy
May 6, 2026
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Astronomers, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), have confirmed the existence of a close quasar pair housed in a pair of merging galaxies seen when the universe was less than a billion years old, ...
With the launch of Space Warps, a new citizen science project on the Zooniverse platform, you can now join in the search to find rare and elusive strong gravitational lenses in never-before-seen images captured by the European ...
Astronomy
Apr 21, 2026
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