Research news on Gravitational lensing

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.

Webb reveals black hole that formed before its galaxy

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 ...

Something just passed between us and a distant star

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 ...

Hubble captures galaxy cluster MACS J1141.6-1905

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 ...

Two blazing quasars caught waltzing into a merger

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, ...

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