Last updated on March 13, 2014 at 15:26 EDT  Astronomers Find
Cosmic Lenses With Feeding Black Holes  March 16, 2012  In
space, it sometimes happens that two galaxies are aligned in
just the right way that the closer galaxy distorts and magnifies
the appearance of the one behind it. For astronomers, finding
these alignments is like coming across giant, cosmic magnifying
glasses.  Now, a team of astronomers, including Daniel Stern
from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has
found several rare examples of this phenomenon, called
gravitational lensing, in which the foreground galaxy hosts an
actively accreting supermassive black hole.  Such feeding black
holes, called quasars, are among the brightest objects in the
universe, far outshining the total starlight of their host
galaxies. Because they are so bright, it is hard for astronomers
to measure the mass of their host galaxies. However,
gravitational lenses are invaluable for estimating the mass of a
quasar’s host galaxy. The amount of the b