Multiple Images of a Highly Magnified Supernova Formed by an Early-Type Cluster Galaxy Lens
Abstract
In 1964, Refsdal hypothesized that a supernova whose light traversed multiple paths around a strong gravitational lens could be used to measure the rate of cosmic expansion. We report the discovery of such a system. In Hubble Space Telescope imaging, we have found four images of a single supernova forming an Einstein cross configuration around a redshift z = 0.54 elliptical galaxy in the MACS J1149.6+2223 cluster. The cluster's gravitational potential also creates multiple images of the z = 1.49 spiral supernova host galaxy, and a future appearance of the supernova elsewhere in the cluster field is expected. The magnifications and staggered arrivals of the supernova images probe the cosmic expansion rate, as well as the distribution of matter in the galaxy and cluster lenses.
Additional Information
© 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 21 November 2014; accepted 10 February 2015. This work is based on data obtained with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. We thank O. Fox, W. Zheng, J. Bloom, C. Keeton, J. Mauerhan, C. Steidel, and A. Strom for helpful discussions, as well as the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Director Matt Mountain for supporting our proposal for follow-up observations. GLASS is supported by NASA through HST grant GO-13459. Support for S.A.R. was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF-51312.01 awarded by STScI, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. Follow-up imaging through the FrontierSN program is supported by NASA through HST grant GO-13386. A.V.F.'s group at the University of California Berkeley has received generous financial assistance from the Christopher R. Redlich Fund, the TABASGO Foundation, Gary and Cynthia Bengier, and NSF grant AST-1211916. The Dark Cosmology Centre is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. Support for A.Z. was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant HF2-51334.001-A awarded by STScI. SN research at Rutgers University is supported in part by NSF CAREER award AST-0847157 to S.W.J.. J.C.M. is supported by NSF grant AST-1313484 and by NASA HST grants GO-13343 and GO-13386; this research was carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. R.G. acknowledges the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales for financial support on the GLASS project. Some of the data presented here were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and NASA; the observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The HST imaging data used in this paper can be obtained from the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at https://archive.stsci.edu, and the Keck-I LRIS spectra can be obtained at http://hercules.berkeley.edu/database.Attached Files
Submitted - 1411.6009v2.pdf
Supplemental Material - aaa3350-Kelly-SM.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 52962
- DOI
- 10.1126/science.aaa3350
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20141217-120319728
- GO-13459
- NASA
- HF-51312.01
- NASA Hubble Fellowship
- NAS 5-26555
- NASA
- GO-13386
- NASA
- Christopher R. Redlich Fund
- TABASGO Foundation
- AST-1211916
- NSF
- Danish National Research Foundation
- HF2-51334.001-A
- NASA Hubble Fellowship
- AST-0847157
- NSF
- AST-1313484
- NSF
- GO-13343
- NASA
- Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES)
- W. M. Keck Foundation
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
-
2014-12-17Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field