Let’s Do The “Time Warp” Again! 🎶 The Distorted Galaxy Seen At Right Hosted A Supernova In 2016.

Let’s do the “Time Warp” again! 🎶 The distorted galaxy seen at right hosted a supernova in 2016. Seven years later, the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a second supernova in the same galaxy. (Look for the supernovas within the curved orange galaxy that forms the left arc, and hone in on in its brightest points.)

The gravity of a foreground galaxy cluster is distorting the light of that distant background galaxy like a funhouse mirror, in a process known as gravitational lensing. This produces five separate images of the galaxy.

Only two images of the supernova are currently visible. The lensed supernova eventually will appear in all five of the galaxy images, but at different times due to the different lengths of travel paths taken by the supernova’s light. This fact will allow astronomers to make a measurement of the history of the universe’s expansion rate.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Pierel (STScI), and A. Newman (Carnegie Institution for Science).

ALT TEXT: Dozens of small spiral and elliptical galaxies are scattered on the black background of space. At right, two long, thin orange arcs curve partway around a grouping of galaxies. They look like they make up the majority of the bottom half of a circle, with a separation toward the center-right. Light is most concentrated in two areas near the centers of the arcs. A significantly shorter arc is to the upper right, while a long, linear orange feature extends radially from the largest and brightest galaxy at the center of the grouping.