Looking through the Hubble Telescope and using celestial lenses in deep space, astronomers were able to watch the same supernova explode four times.
According to Space.com, the observers saw the explosion in a highly unique way thanks to a galaxy cluster along the way that warped their view. Astronomers have used in the past other galaxies as magnifying glasses to see farther into space, but this is reportedly a first.
"It really threw me for a loop when I spotted the four images surrounding the galaxy-- it was a complete surprise," study lead author Patrick Kelly, a member of the Grism Lens Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS) collaboration, said in a press release.
Kelly and his colleagues published their work in the journal Science.
"It was predicted 50 years ago that a supernova could be gravitationally lensed like this, but it's taken a long time for someone to find an example," he told Space.com. "It's fun to have been able to find the first one."
Steve Rodney, Frontier Field Supernova Search team and GLASS collaborator, assisted in spotting the quadruple supernova image.
"Our model for the dark matter in the cluster gives us the prediction of when the next image will appear because it tells us how long each train track is, which correlates with time," Rodney said in the release. "We already missed one that we think appeared about 20 years ago, and we found these four images after they had already appeared. The prediction of this future image is the one that is most exciting because we might be able to catch it. We hope to come back to this field with Hubble, and we'll keep looking to see when that expected next image appears."
