Astronomers Discover Gravitational Lens at Record Distance -- and Can Hardly Believe Their Luck
Light is affected by gravity, and light passing a distant galaxy will be deflected as a result. Since the first find in 1979, numerous such gravitational lenses have been discovered. A team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has found the most distant gravitational lens yet - a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. But this discovery also poses a mystery. Lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare. Given this and recent other finds, astronomers either have been phenomenally lucky or, more likely, they have underestimated substantially the number of small, very young galaxies in the early universe.
