Overlooked for 140 years: Perfect Einstein ring discovered by accident

Study Finds ^ | February 11, 2025 | Staff

[Nateman]

Wiki Article about a predicted Supernova using a Einstein ring .

[SuperLuminal]

Outstanding work...

[alexander_busek]

When a supernova appeared in one of the images a successful prediction of when it would appear in another image was achieved.

Interesting! Thanks!

Of particular importance to me is that, in the case of the lensed galaxy containing the supernova, the delay was on the order of only 20 years; this was the first time I had seen the effect actually quantified in a popular scientific article. The diagrams generally used to illustrate and explain the effect are thus obviously not at all to scale.

I was hoping that there might be instances in which the time-delay amounted to many millions of years.

The ability to map the distribution of mass in the lensing galaxy (or galactic cluster) is very intriguing! I wonder if, by waiting a few decades, observing a slightly different Einstein ring, and then re-calculating the mass-distribution, based upon the slight shift in positions in the intervening (short) time, the calculations might also be further refined in an iterative fashion and the resolution thus boosted.

Fascinating stuff!

Regards,

[Nateman]

In that other link it mentions an astronomer who had the same idea you did:

SN Refsdal is the first detected multiply-lensed supernova, visible within the field of the galaxy cluster MACS J1149+2223. It was named after Norwegian astrophysicist Sjur Refsdal, who, in 1964, first proposed using time-delayed images from a lensed supernova to study the expansion of the universe. The observations were made using the Hubble Space Telescope.