Optimus Prime said

For the first time, researchers have used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to uncover an example of a previously hypothetical phenomenon known as an "Einstein zig-zag" — where light from an object in the distant cosmos passes through two different regions of warped space-time. The newly confirmed effect, which was discovered among six identical copies of a luminous quasar, could shed light on an issue that is beginning to plague cosmology, experts say.

In 2018, astronomers discovered a quartet of identical bright points billions of light-years from Earth, later named J1721+8842. Initially, the scientists assumed that the four lights were mirror images of a single quasar — a luminous galactic core powered by a feeding black hole — that had been duplicated through a phenomenon known as "gravitational lensing."

Gravitational lensing happens when light from a distant object appears to get bent as it passes through warped space-time that has been pulled out of shape by the immense gravity of a lensing object — usually a massive galaxy or cluster of galaxies — located between the distant object and the observer. This warping effect can either duplicate the initial light source, as the light takes different routes around the lensing object, or stretch out the light into luminous halos, known as Einstein rings after Albert Einstein, who first predicted gravitational lensing with his theory of general relativity in 1915.

But in a 2022 study, researchers discovered that J1721+8842 had two additional points of light alongside the original quartet, as well as a faint red Einstein ring. The newly discovered points were slightly fainter than the other four points, which led researchers to suspect that the light show showed a pair of adjacent quasars, known as a binary quasar, that had been duplicated three times (rather than a single quasar that had been copied six times)...........


https://www.livescience.com/space/c...-plain-sight-and-it-could-help-save-cosmology

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