Sunday Morning Insight: Another Strange PSF in the Wild

Rambus Lensless Smart Sensors are not the only ones with strange PSFs. The Universe also provides a few of those naturally weird PSFs thanks to weak lensing [1]. Here is an instance I spotted thanks to Dan Piponi's G+ feed:

A figure from:


Multiple Images of a Highly Magnified Supernova Formed by an Early-Type Cluster Galaxy Lens by Patrick L. Kelly (UCB), Steven A. Rodney (JHU), Tommaso Treu (UCLA), Ryan J. Foley (Illinois), Gabriel Brammer (STScI), Kasper B. Schmidt (UCSB), Adi Zitrin (Caltech), Alessandro Sonnenfeld (UCLA), Louis-Gregory Strolger (STScI), Or Graur (NYU/AMNH), Alexei V. Filippenko (UCB), Saurabh W. Jha (Rutgers), Adam G. Riess (JHU/STScI), Marusa Bradac (UCD), Benjamin J. Weiner (Arizona), Daniel Scolnic (Chicago), Matthew A. Malkan (UCLA), Anja von der Linden (DARK/Stanford), Michele Trenti (Melbourne), Jens Hjorth (DARK), Raphael Gavazzi (IAP), Adriano Fontana (INAF-OAR), Julian Merten (Caltech), Curtis McCully (LCOGT/UC Santa Barbara), Tucker Jones (UCLA), Marc Postman (STScI), Alan Dressler (Carnegie Obs.), Brandon Patel (Rutgers), S. Bradley Cenko (GSFC/UMD), Melissa L. Graham (UCB), Bradley E. Tucker (UCB/ANU)

In 1964, Refsdal hypothesized that a supernova whose light traversed multiple paths around a strong gravitational lens could be used to measure the rate of cosmic expansion. We report the discovery of such a system. In Hubble Space Telescope imaging, we have found four images of a single supernova forming an Einstein cross configuration around a redshift z=0.54 elliptical galaxy in the MACS J1149.6+2223 cluster. The cluster's gravitational potential also creates multiple images of the z=1.49 spiral supernova host galaxy, and a future appearance of the supernova elsewhere in the cluster field is expected. The magnifications and staggered arrivals of the supernova images probe the cosmic expansion rate, as well as the distribution of matter in the galaxy and cluster lenses.

[1] From "These Technologies Do Not Exist" page:

A Galaxy Wide Single Pixel Camera (November 6th, 2010):
On May 18th, 2011 a presentation entitled It's full of stars and everything in between: presented Compressed Sensing for Weak Lensing and it was eventually featured on a preprint/paper entitled A Compressed Sensing Approach to 3D Weak Lensing by Adrienne Leonard,François-Xavier Dupé, Jean-Luc Starck (November 30th, 2011) 

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