Astronomers Device a New Way to Measure Cosmic Expansion with Lensed Supernovae
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Researchers in Munich have used the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona to capture five images of one and the same supernova in a single picture. The gravity of two foreground galaxies has deflected the light from a supernova far in the background along different paths to Earth.
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Astronomers Device a New Way to Measure Cosmic Expansion with Lensed Supernovae By Matthew Williams - March 02, 2026 11:21 PM UTC | Observing Superliminous supernovae are miraculous events. For astronomers, they also provide a vital tool for measuring cosmic distances and the rate at which the Universe is expanding. As part of the Cosmic Distance Ladder , these incredibly bright stellar explosions are the "standard candles" for objects billions of light-years away. In a rare event, researchers from the University of Munich, using the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, witnessed a superluminous supernova 10 billion light-years away that was far brighter than most explosions of its kind. What was especially amazing about this supernova was that it appeared five times in the night sky due to gravitational lensing by two foreground galaxies. These galaxies bent the path of the supernova's light, causing it to take different paths. Because these paths have different lengths, the light appeared in different places around the galaxies at different times. By measuring the time delays between the multiple images, the researchers were able to obtain measurements of how fast the Universe is expanding - aka the Hubble-Lemaitre Constant . The team consisted of researchers from the Technical University of Munich , the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics , the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , the E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , ETH Zurich, the Research Center for the Early Universe , the Cosmic Dawn Center , the Ulugh Beg Astronomical Institute , the Chinese Academy of Sciences , Institute of Space Sciences (ICE, CSIC), the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS , the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan , the European Southern Observatory , the Space Telescope Science Institute , and multiple universities. *Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona, USA. Credit & ©: Dr. Christoph Saulder/MPE* The paper describing their observations has been a...
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