The Hubble Space Telescope is a constant source of beautiful pictures of the wonders of space, and this week’s Hubble image shows a wonderful example of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, ...

Anyone who has ever measured something twice, like the width of a doorway, and gotten two different answers knows how annoying it can be. Now imagine you’re a physicist, and what you’re measuring ...

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the US National Science Foundation and US Department of Energy's Office of Science, will add an unprecedented amount of cosmological data to the study of ...

An example of a gravitational lens found in the DESI Legacy Surveys data. The two red streaks near the middle of DESI-010.8534-20.6214 are the gravitationally lensed arcs ("straight" arcs) -- highly ...

Thanks to the presence of a natural "zoom lens" in space, University of Chicago scientists working with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have obtained a uniquely close-up look at the brightest ...

object like a bright quasar hidden behind it. But there has been a persistent mystery for over 20 years: Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts there should be an odd number of images, yet ...

It’s one of the most memorable moments of my career – and not in a good way. I was giving a talk to a room packed full of eminent astrophysicists, but there had been a bit of a childcare crisis, so ...

Astronomers are living in a golden age of bigger and better telescopes. But even our most advanced technology pales in comparison to the power of nature’s own “cosmic magnifying glasses” – strong ...