Planets usually stay close to their host stars, tracing steady paths shaped by gravity. Yet some planets break free and drift ...

One of the most stubborn issues in cosmology today concerns the universe's rate of expansion. Scientists know it's expanding, ...

By studying how light from eight distant quasars is gravitationally lensed as it propagates towards Earth, astronomers have ...

Astronomers used a cosmic lens to reveal a hyperactive protocluster. ALMA and VLA observations uncover tightly packed ...

Let's turn the sun into a telescope. In fact, we don't have to do any work—we just have to be in the right spot. But how can the sun be a telescope? The sun is not a mirror, but it is a lens. And we ...

A group of astronomers have made history by capturing an image of a record number of stars from a time when the universe was half its age. The astronomers detected 44 stars in the "Dragon Arc" galaxy, ...

Pictures of gravitational lenses from the AGEL survey. The pictures are centred on the foreground galaxy and include the object name. Each panel includes the confirmed distance to the foreground ...

The vast majority of matter is dark – invisible until it is detected only through its gravitational effects. The newly discovered object could be a clump of dark matter, or it could also be a compact, ...

A team of astronomers led by Arjen van der Wel from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) has found the most distant gravitational lens yet — a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein’s ...

The gravitational lens JVAS B1938+666 consists of massive bodies ranging from 6.5 billion to 11 billion light-years away, ...