The images from the Webb telescope are more than just dazzling. It shows distorted space.

Space is very psychedelic.

There are objects in the universe that are so massive—usually clusters of galaxies—that they warp space like a bowling ball on a mattress. This creates a curved cosmic lens. “Light travels along that bend rather than in a straight line, distorting and illuminating what’s behind the object,” NASA explains.

A new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, a powerful observatory one million miles from Earth, shows a galaxy distorted by this effect — technically known as “gravitational lensing,” says Alber Einstein predicted this long ago.

The Webb image below shows a sea of ​​galaxies, some of which are spiral-shaped like our Milky Way. Near center right is the twisted and stretched galaxy MRG-M0138, about 10 billion light-years away. It’s an unusually old, distant galaxy, but natural cosmic lenses magnify the light and make it appear vivid.

In this magnified light, there’s a surprise.

A close-up of a stretched galaxy reveals the bright light of an exploding star, a violent event called a supernova. Researchers call it a “supernova encore,” and the massive gravitational lensing causes it to appear multiple times in this image, which you can see indicated by the circles below.

What’s more, astronomers hope the footage will reveal There are more after finishing A replica of the same supernova from the 2030s. This will provide astronomers with a rare and valuable opportunity to measure the rate of expansion of the universe.

“When a supernova explodes behind a gravitational lens, its light takes several different paths to reach Earth. We can compare these paths to several trains leaving the station at the same time, all traveling at the same speed and heading to Same location. The trains take different routes, and because of differences in trip length and terrain, the trains don’t arrive at their destinations at the same time.” Justin Pierel, NASA Einstein Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Astronomy Home Andrew Newman This was conducted at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s observatory, NASA explained in a statement.

Mix and match speed of light

“By measuring differences in the timing of supernova images, we can measure the history of the universe’s expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, which is a major challenge in today’s cosmology,” the researchers added.

The power of the Webb telescope

The Webb telescope is a scientific collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency that aims to peer into the deepest reaches of the universe and reveal new insights about the early universe. But it’s also looking at interesting planets in our galaxy, as well as planets and moons in our solar system.

Here’s how Weber achieved an unparalleled feat that will likely last for decades:

– Giant mirror: Weber’s mirror captures light and is over 21 feet in diameter. That’s more than two and a half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant and older objects. As mentioned above, this telescope is observing stars and galaxies that formed 13 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.

“We’re going to see the first stars and galaxies forming,” astronomer Jean Creighton, director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.

– Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which primarily observes light that we can see, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it observes light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see more of the universe. Infrared light has longer wavelengths than visible light, so light waves can pass through cosmic clouds more efficiently; the light doesn’t collide with these tightly packed particles as often and is scattered. Eventually, Webb’s infrared vision could penetrate places Hubble couldn’t.

“It lifts the veil,” Creighton said.

– Gaze at distant exoplanets: Webb telescope Carry specialized equipment called a spectrometer This will revolutionize our understanding of these distant worlds. These instruments can decipher the molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) present in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets—whether they are gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb will observe exoplanets in the Milky Way. Who knows what we might find?

“We might learn something we never thought of,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable in 2021.

Astronomers have managed to discover interesting chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and as mentioned above, observatories have begun observing one of the most anticipated places in the universe: the rocky, Earth-sized planet of the Trappist solar system planetary system.