Astronomers have discovered something truly remarkable: the first-ever gravitationally lensed superluminous supernova that can be seen as multiple, clearly separated images.
The distant explosion, named SN 2025wny, offers a rare glimpse into the early Universe and provides powerful new evidence for Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
SN 2025wny is so far away that its light has taken about 10 billion years to reach Earth.
When the star exploded, the Universe was only around 4 billion years old, less than a third of its current age.
Under normal circumstances, a supernova at such an extreme distance would be far too faint to observe from the ground.
But nature stepped in with a helping hand.
Two massive galaxies located between Earth and the supernova acted like a cosmic magnifying glass. Their gravity bent and amplified the light from the explosion, making it about 50 times brighter and splitting it into several distinct images in the sky.
This phenomenon, known as gravitational lensing, allowed astronomers to study an event that would otherwise have remained invisible.
“This is nature’s own telescope,” said lead researcher Joel Johansson from Stockholm University. “Thanks to the magnification, we can study a supernova at a distance where detailed observations would normally be impossible.”
Beyond its visual spectacle, SN 2025wny could help solve one of cosmology’s biggest puzzles: how fast the Universe is expanding.
Because each lensed image of the supernova follows a slightly different path around the foreground galaxies, the light from each image arrives at Earth at a different time. By measuring these time delays, astronomers can calculate the Hubble constant, a key number that describes the expansion rate of the Universe.
This approach may shed light on the long-standing “Hubble tension,” a disagreement between measurements of the expansion rate made using the early Universe and those based on nearby objects. Lensed supernovae like SN 2025wny offer an independent and especially clean way to tackle this problem.
The explosion itself was also extraordinary.
SN 2025wny belongs to a rare class known as superluminous supernovae, which are far brighter than typical stellar explosions.
Its early light revealed an extremely hot and energetic event. The intense brightness even illuminated its host galaxy, allowing astronomers to detect chemical fingerprints that suggest the galaxy is small, metal-poor, and actively forming stars—conditions thought to be common in the early Universe.
The discovery was made possible through rapid teamwork between multiple observatories around the world, including surveys that scan the sky nightly and powerful telescopes capable of detailed follow-up observations. Looking ahead, astronomers are already using space telescopes to study SN 2025wny in greater detail.
This discovery shows that we are now capable of finding and studying these rare, magnified explosions from the distant past—and many more are expected in the near future.
