19 Feb 2026
Munich astronomers image and model extremely rare gravitationally lensed supernova. It as an unprecedented chance to determine the growth of the Universe.
That the Universe is expanding has been known for almost a hundred years now, but how fast? The exact rate of that expansion remains hotly debated, even challenging the standard model of cosmology. A research team at LMU, TUM, and the Max Planck Institutes for Astrophysics (MPA) and for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has now imaged and modelled an exceptionally rare supernova nicknamed SN Winny that could provide a new, independent way to measure how fast the Universe is expanding.
“The fact that this system is the only strongly lensed superluminous supernova known so far makes it particularly exciting”, says LMU-physicist Leon Ecker, the first author of a paper submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics describing these results. “It is ideally suited to derive a precise value of the Hubble constant.”Continue