article_snippet: Astronomers have captured four images of the ancient star nine billion light years away as Light from the supernova performed an incredible cosmic illusion.
article_snippet: The Hubble Telescope snapped four images of the ancient star with the help of a galaxy cluster that acted as a natural magnifying lens.
article_snippet: The powerful gravity of a galaxy embedded in a massive cluster of galaxies in this Hubble Space Telescope image is producing multiple images of a single distant supernova far behind The Hubble Telescope.
article_snippet: Supernova could be seen because Light from the supernova took different paths around the cluster located between the exploded star and the Earth-orbiting telescope.
article_snippet: Light from the supernova enables telescopes like Hubble to see objects that would otherwise be too faint and far away.
article_snippet: By chance, the supernova, which exploded about nine billion years ago, was aligned with the intervening galaxy cluster being used during a Hubble observation period in 2011.
article_snippet: Scientists returned to the latest images in November to look for supernovae and found the quadruple rendering - a configuration known as an Einstein cross. '
article_snippet: The supernova team was looking at these image and bam, up popped not one, not two, not three, but four images,' said astronomer Jennifer Lotz, with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. '
article_snippet: astronomer Jennifer Lotz, with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland were incredibly lucky.'
article_snippet: Although astronomers have discovered dozens of multiply imaged galaxies and quasars, astronomer Jennifer Lotz, with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland have never seen a stellar explosion resolved into several images .
article_snippet: The object has been named Supernova Refsdal in honour of Norwegian astronomer Sjur Refsdal and is the first detected multiply imaged supernova.
article_snippet: the first detected multiply imaged supernova appears in the bottom centre of this image .
article_snippet: the first detected multiply imaged supernova appears about 20 times brighter than about 20 times natural brightness due to the combined effects of two overlapping lenses, said Jens Hjorth with the Dark Cosmology Center in Denmark.
article_snippet: The four supernova images captured by Hubble appeared within a few days or weeks of each other and we found each other after each other had appeared,' Steve Rodney, with Johns Hopkins University. '
article_snippet: a supernova's various light paths are analogous to several trains that leave a station at the same time, all traveling at the same speed and bound for the same location.
article_snippet: Similarly, the supernova images do not appear at the same time because some of the light is delayed by traveling around bends created by the gravity of dense dark matter in the intervening galaxy cluster. '
article_snippet: Measuring the time delays between images offers clues to the type of warped-space terrain the supernova's light had to cover and will help the astronomers fine-tune the models that map out the cluster's mass. '
article_snippet: Nine billion light-years away, a galaxy's gravity is projecting a distant supernova onto the sky forming what's called an Einstein Cross (shown by the yellow points)
highlights_snippet: Supernova could be seen because Supernova light took different paths .
  
highlights_snippet: This allowed astronomers to take four images of the ancient star .
  