Hubble spies a quintuple quasar… except it's a cosmic mirage

Peering across the Universe is hard. Happily, the Universe sometimes provides a little help, using gravity to give light a swift kick in the photons.

I'm talking about gravitational lensing:

Briefly, gravitational lensing is when the gravity of a massive object — a star, a black hole, a galaxy — bends space around it, causing light passing by to curve, like a car following the curve of a road. Einstein [wrote about this in relation to his work on Relativity], saying that matter bends space and...