Webb telescope snaps view of an exploded star. It's an invaluable find.
In a series of papers, Brenda Frye shows how gravitational lensing can be used to solve the greatest puzzle facing astronomy today.
The James Webb Space Telescope's latest psychedelic view reveals an exploded star.
But this supernova is special. That's because, from our perch in the galaxy, the new stellar blast appears three times in a warped line — like it's floating in front of a funhouse mirror. This distorting effect happens because objects in space can be so massive — often clusters of galaxies — that they warp the cosmos, like a bowling ball sitting on a mattress. This creates a curved "cosmic lens," bending and distorting light, while also magnifying and brightening the light.
"The lens, consisting of a cluster of galaxies that is situated between the supernova and us, bends the supernova’s light into multiple images," Brenda Frye, an astronomer from the University of Arizona who helped undertake the new research, said in a statement.
Though, she added, in the case of this supernova, a "trifold mirror" is even better suited to describe this triple view. "This is similar to how a trifold vanity mirror presents three different images of a person sitting in front of it," Frye said.
Crucially, the mirror effect is of great value to astronomers. They can use the differences in light from the distant supernova to help measure the long-sought expansion of the universe (yes, the sprawling universe is constantly expanding).
"To achieve three images, the light traveled along three different paths," Frye explained. "Since each path had a different length, and light traveled at the same speed, the supernova was imaged in this Webb observation at three different times during its explosion. In the trifold mirror analogy, a time-delay ensued in which the right-hand mirror depicted a person lifting a comb, the left-hand mirror showed hair being combed, and the middle mirror displayed the person putting down the comb."
The three circles below show the supernova, dubbed "H0pe" — H0 is short for the "Hubble constant," the name for the rate of the universe's expansion. The vivid, white, fuzzy objects are the galaxies in the foreground creating the lens, located some 3.6 billion light-years away.
The blown-up box shows the supervova "H0pe," which from our vantage point appears three times, due to the effect of gravitational lensing. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / B. Frye (University of Arizona) / R. Windhorst (Arizona State University) / S. Cohen (Arizona State University) / J. D’Silva (University of Western Australia, Perth) / A. Koekemoer (Space Telescope Science Institute) / J. Summers (Arizona State University)
The universe's rate of expansion is an ongoing area of research, with different methods employed to narrow down an answer. In this case, the light measurements Frye and the team recorded from supernova H0pe show an expansion of 75.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec, with an uncertainty range of plus 8.1 or minus 5.5 parsecs. These are big numbers. For reference, a parsec equals 3.26 light-years, and a single light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles.
Don't let your head explode.