A massive galaxy has created a rare distortion in the path of light that has traveled billions of years to reach us from a more distant galaxy.
It’s called an Einstein cross – when the curvature of space-time around a massive foreground object splits the light behind it into four, like the points of a cross. Its confirmation and analysis adds to a slowly growing catalog of these rare alignments, which can help us better understand the more distant reaches of the Universe.
A paper detailing the system has been accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and is available on preprint resource arXiv.
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