Distant Blazar Imaged with Gamma Rays for First Time [VIDEO]

The first-ever gamma ray measurements of a gravitational lens will open up new avenues for research, including novel ways to study black holes, NASA said Monday.

A gravitational lens is a kind of natural telescope that occurs because of a rare cosmic alignment that allows the gravity of a massive object to bend and amplify light from a more distant source.

NASA's Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) made the initial observations that led to the gamma ray measurements of the gravitational lens in September 2012. The LAT detected a bright series of gamma-ray flares from a distant light source, B0218+357, which is classified as a blazar.

A blazar is a type of active galaxy noted for its intense emissions and unpredictable behavior. At the center of the blazar is a supermassive black hole. As matter gets sucked into the blazar galaxy's black hole, some of it gets blasted off course, traveling in the opposite direction at nearly the speed of light

Between this blazar and Earth is another galaxy. Any light we see on Earth from the blazar must first pass through the in between galaxy, thus forming a gravitational lens.

The galaxy between Earth and the blazar causes light form the blazar to distort and bend to two different paths, which makes the blazar in the background appear as two images from our telescopes on Earth.

When being observed by radio and optical telescopes, this double image can be resolved for, but when using gamma-ray detection equipment, such as the LAT, it cannot. Instead, the Fermi team uses what they call the "delayed playback" effect to view the distant blazar.

"One light path is slightly longer than the other, so when we detect flares in one image we can try to catch them days later when they replay in the other image," said Jeff Scargle, an astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

In a week of using the LAT to study the blazar, the team identified three episodes of flares showing playback delays of 11.46 days.

"Over the course of a day, one of these flares can brighten the blazar by 10 times in gamma rays but only 10 percent in visible light and radio, which tells us that the region emitting gamma rays is very small compared to those emitting at lower energies," said team member Stefan Larsson, an astrophysicist at Stockholm University in Sweden.

These gamma-ray observations "could help provide new insights into the workings of powerful black-hole jets and establish new constraints on important cosmological quantities like the Hubble constant, which describes the universe's rate of expansion," NASA said in a statement.