A compound lens forged by two galaxies is helping astronomers get a bead on the Hubble Constant and dark energy.
A light source in space originally believed to be a galaxy bending light from a distant active galactic core is actually an extremely rare and first-of-its-kind gravitational lens, according to a team of researchers that studied the system.
“In this letter, we present evidence from the light curves obtained at the Nordic Optical Telescope , new redshift measurements from the James Webb Space Telescope Near InfraRed Spectrograph , and updated lens models, which unambiguously confirm the scenario where one single source is lensed in J1721+8842,” the team wrote.
Gravitational lenses are of use to astronomers because they magnify distant light that would otherwise be too faint to see. In other words, gravitational lenses are portals into very distant and ancient parts of the universe; in 2022, astronomers leveraged a gravitational lens to spotSometimes, gravitational lenses form rings of light in the sky, which are called Einstein rings.
“Full lens models, time-delay measurements and cosmology constraints derived from this system will be published in follow-up papers as part of the TDCOSMO collaboration,” the researchers added. This means the double lens system can help astrophysicists’ understanding of the Hubble constant, the number that describes the rate of the universe’s expansion.
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