Bound star clusters observed in a lensed galaxy 460 Myr after the Big Bang.

The Cosmic Gems arc is among the brightest and highly magnified galaxies observed at redshift z ≈ 10.2 (ref. ).

Observing cosmic-ray extensive air showers with a silicon imaging detector.

Extensive air showers induced from high-energy cosmic rays provide a window into understanding the most energetic phenomena in the universe. We present a new method for observing these showers using the silicon imaging detector Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC). This method has the advantage of being able to measure individual secondary particles.

Constraints on the Hubble constant from supernova Refsdal's reappearance.

The gravitationally lensed supernova Refsdal appeared in multiple images produced through gravitational lensing by a massive foreground galaxy cluster. After the supernova appeared in 2014, lens models of the galaxy cluster predicted that an additional image of the supernova would appear in 2015, which was subsequently observed. We use the time delays between the images to perform a blinded measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe, quantified by the Hubble constant ().

A magnified compact galaxy at redshift 9.51 with strong nebular emission lines.

Ultraviolet light from early galaxies is thought to have ionized gas in the intergalactic medium. However, there are few observational constraints on this epoch because of the faintness of those galaxies and the redshift of their optical light into the infrared. We report the observation, in JWST imaging, of a distant galaxy that is magnified by gravitational lensing.

A close quasar pair in a disk-disk galaxy merger at z = 2.17.

Galaxy mergers produce pairs of supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which may be witnessed as dual quasars if both SMBHs are rapidly accreting. The kiloparsec (kpc)-scale separation represents a physical regime sufficiently close for merger-induced effects to be important yet wide enough to be directly resolvable with the facilities currently available. Whereas many kpc-scale, dual active galactic nuclei-the low-luminosity counterparts of quasars-have been observed in low-redshift mergers, no unambiguous dual quasar is known at cosmic noon (z ≈ 2), the peak of global star formation and quasar activity.

Shock cooling of a red-supergiant supernova at redshift 3 in lensed images.

The core-collapse supernova of a massive star rapidly brightens when a shock, produced following the collapse of its core, reaches the stellar surface. As the shock-heated star subsequently expands and cools, its early-time light curve should have a simple dependence on the size of the progenitor and therefore final evolutionary state. Measurements of the radius of the progenitor from early light curves exist for only a small sample of nearby supernovae, and almost all lack constraining ultraviolet observations within a day of explosion.

A highly magnified star at redshift 6.2.

Galaxy clusters magnify background objects through strong gravitational lensing. Typical magnifications for lensed galaxies are factors of a few but can also be as high as tens or hundreds, stretching galaxies into giant arcs. Individual stars can attain even higher magnifications given fortuitous alignment with the lensing cluster.

Strong gravitational lensing of explosive transients.

Recent rapid progress in time domain surveys makes it possible to detect various types of explosive transients in the Universe in large numbers, some of which will be gravitationally lensed into multiple images. Although a large number of strongly lensed distant galaxies and quasars have already been discovered, strong lensing of explosive transients opens up new applications, including improved measurements of cosmological parameters, powerful probes of small scale structure of the Universe, and new observational tests of dark matter scenarios, thanks to their rapidly evolving light curves as well as their compact sizes. In particular, compact sizes of emitting regions of these transient events indicate that wave optics effects play an important role in some cases, which can lead to totally new applications of these lensing events.

Detection of the gravitational lens magnifying a type Ia supernova.

Objects of known brightness, like type Ia supernovae (SNIa), can be used to measure distances. If a massive object warps spacetime to form multiple images of a background SNIa, a direct test of cosmic expansion is also possible. However, these lensing events must first be distinguished from other rare phenomena.

Self-calibrated cluster counts as a probe of primordial non-Gaussianity.

We show that the ability to probe primordial non-Gaussianity with cluster counts is drastically improved by adding the excess variance of counts which contains information on the clustering. The conflicting dependences of changing the mass threshold and including primordial non-Gaussianity on the mass function and biasing indicate that the self-calibrated cluster counts break the degeneracy between primordial non-Gaussianity and the observable-mass relation. Based on the Fisher matrix analysis, we show that the count variance improves constraints on fNL by more than an order of magnitude.

Constraints from the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe on decaying cold dark matter.

We reformulate cosmological perturbations in the decaying cold dark matter model, and calculate cosmological microwave background anisotropies. By comparing our predictions with data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, we derive a new bound on the abundance and lifetime of decaying dark matter particles. The lifetime is constrained to Gamma(- 1)> or =123 Gyr at 68% C.

A gravitationally lensed quasar with quadruple images separated by 14.62 arcseconds.

Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for the study of the distribution of dark matter in the Universe. The cold-dark-matter model of the formation of large-scale structures (that is, clusters of galaxies and even larger assemblies) predicts the existence of quasars gravitationally lensed by concentrations of dark matter so massive that the quasar images would be split by over 7 arcsec. Numerous searches for large-separation lensed quasars have, however, been unsuccessful.