Content tagged "gravitational lensing".
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Planets don't shine on their own, yet astronomers have already confirmed more than 6,000 beyond our solar system. Some are found when a foreground star's gravity briefly bends and brightens the light of a star behind it, revealing a hidden world in the distortion. The Roman Space Telescope, with a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble's, is about to make this technique the main event.
JWST found a bar structure roughly 4.5 kpc (about 15,000 light-years) long in a galaxy at redshift z=5.102, seen just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. A well-formed bar is a sign of a mature galaxy — and this one grew up faster than expected. SORABUMI explains.
In 2026, JWST confirmed that the galaxy cluster XLSSC 122, some 10.4 billion light-years away, is producing powerful gravitational lensing. SORABUMI explains how a foreground cluster's gravity bends and magnifies light from behind it, and why this densely packed cluster shouldn't have existed so soon.
In March 2025, ESA's Euclid space telescope trained its lens on a densely packed region toward the Milky Way's core. Here's what gravitational microlensing — the technique that lets stars find other stars' planets — could uncover, as data from the survey prepares for public release on June 24.
Stars, galaxies, gas — everything we can observe makes up just 5% of the universe. The other 95% is something we can't see. Dark matter and dark energy sit at the heart of modern cosmology, and we still don't know what either of them is.