back to article Massive gravitational lens flare unveils EINSTEIN CROSS SUPERNOVA

“That's odd” must be a scientist's favourite phrase: a set of images of a distant supernova has shown off a phenomenon first predicted more than 50 years ago in 1964. The supernova was spotted in Hubble images by Dr Patrick Kelly of Berkeley while searching for distant galaxies – and because of the effect of gravitational …

  1. Big-nosed Pengie
    Headmaster

    El Reg, you really need to find correspondents who have a basic command of English, or use a sub editor.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      El Reg will now find some old mechanic dude who worked on subs and make him editor.

      1. Sarah Balfour

        I worked on subs once… I had a Saturday job in the local sarnie shop.

        They ain't gonna get any better, trust me - and will probably get FAR worse, especially as it's Friday.

    2. Mark 85

      Which version of English? British, 'Merican, Aussie, other?

  2. Ashton Black

    Nice work astroboffinry!

    Very cool stuff. (Granted, a supernova is something like 100 billion deg K, but you get my point)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nice work astroboffinry!

      Cool compared to what went before it in the inflation phase.

  3. Chris Miller

    Gravitational lensing was first predicted by Einstein: the presence of enough mass, he reasoned, would bend light passing an object.

    Not quite right. Newtonian physics predicts the bending of light in a gravitational field (the calculation is A-level standard, and was first performed in the 18th century - the fact that light may be massless doesn't matter because all objects with a given velocity and initial position, whose mass is small in comparison with the gravitating mass, follow essentially the same path). But General Relativity predicts a deviation twice as large, which is what Eddington famously measured.

    1. phil dude
      Coat

      would that be....

      corpuscular?

      P.

  4. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Light gets bent, big-time

    I think that should be "minimal (proper) time"

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Headmaster

    No - space time gets bent, light travels in straight line. Tut tut Reg are we the Daily Mail now ?

    1. A. Coatsworth Silver badge
      Joke

      Woah, there's no need to use such language over a technicality!

      If you don't like space-time, it's ok. No need to tell it to get bent...

  6. frank ly

    Space ...Time ... Looking back

    “this deceleration took place around where this supernova is located.”

    Should that be "... around _when_ this supernova is being observed" ?

  7. Katy_B

    Ok, Chegwin!! A phenomenA??

  8. willi0000000

    "now that's odd"

    . . . still the best words a scientist will ever utter.

  9. Florida1920
    Mushroom

    That's odd

    That's what the bloke at Chernobyl said, just bef

  10. Gartal

    "This is partly related to the fact that the universe decelerated before it accelerated" This implies that there was a second slightly smaller bang doesn't it? Sort of sloppy seconds for the Universe.

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