07-25-2017, 06:23 PM
"Discovery of a rare quadruple gravitational lens candidate with Pan-STARRS"
This discovery was first made by the Pan-STARRS survey on Maui's Haleakala and then confirmed by the Keck observatory on MK. It's a distant quasar (an active galaxy with a massive black hole producing energy thousands of times greater than our Galaxy) and often they look similar to stars in a basic astronomical image.
In this case, the gravitation of an almost invisible galaxy between the quasar and the Earth has affected space-time enough that the light from the quasar has split into four distinct beams from our perspective, so a single point-source now appears as four separate objects. More info here:
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-discovery-...-lens.html
This discovery was first made by the Pan-STARRS survey on Maui's Haleakala and then confirmed by the Keck observatory on MK. It's a distant quasar (an active galaxy with a massive black hole producing energy thousands of times greater than our Galaxy) and often they look similar to stars in a basic astronomical image.
In this case, the gravitation of an almost invisible galaxy between the quasar and the Earth has affected space-time enough that the light from the quasar has split into four distinct beams from our perspective, so a single point-source now appears as four separate objects. More info here:
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-discovery-...-lens.html