In 2035, a cosmic ghost 'traveled through time' to Earth

The James Webb Space Telescope has just discovered a new ghostly phenomenon 10 billion light years from Earth .

Through the special "gravitational lensing" effect created by the galaxy cluster MACS J0138.0-2155 , scientists discovered something interesting that will appear with many different images to the eyes of Earthlings.

It is a type Ia supernova called Encore and its host galaxy is called MRG-M0138 , located 10 billion light-years from Earth.

The Encore supernova inside the MRG-M0138 galaxy, 10 billion light-years from Earth, appears as two curved streaks of light of different lengths - (Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA).

This means that the light from them – the stuff that creates the images we see – also takes billions of years to travel through space-time to reach a telescope orbiting the Earth.

Not only interesting because of their antiquity, they also bring a very spooky look thanks to the gravitational lens MACS J0138.0-2155.

Gravitational lenses can be thought of as cosmic magnifying glasses, usually large clusters of galaxies that lie across the line of sight between Earth and a more distant object, thereby magnifying more distant objects by bending space-time, distorting the light from that object.

Astronomical magnifying glasses are always complex, uneven clusters of structures, which can cause light to scatter and follow different paths, causing objects behind it to appear in many different versions.

The ancient galaxy MRG-M0138 appears in five different images.

But most interestingly, the Encore supernova - an ancient stellar explosion - appeared in two different images.

Its first image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016, is called the Requiem supernova, and appears as a ghostly crescent of light.

This past November, images from James Webb showed that the crescent of light has a new companion, dubbed Encore.

However, a research team led by Dr. Justin Pierel from the Space Telescope Science Institute and Dr. Andrew New Man from the Carnegie Institution for Science Observatory (USA) determined that Requiem and Encore are one and the same. From then on, they called both ghosts by the common name Encore.

Not to mention, calculations show that a third "ghost" from Encore will appear before Earth's eyes around 2035, in a currently empty sky.

The light that makes up each image will follow different paths, and thus will reach Earthlings with different delays.

This cloning is all the more unique because Encore is a Type Ia supernova, a powerful, mysterious, and rare form of supernova.

Scientists are also anxiously awaiting 2023, because Encore's third image, expected to be as stunningly clear and sharp as the previous two, could help yield a new measurement of the Hubble constant, or the rate at which the universe is expanding.