What are differences in ages among the lensed images of RX J1131-1231?

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Astronomy

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NASA recently released an image of a lensed quasar named RX J1131-1231, which shows three distinct images of that quasar.

Do we have any way of knowing the difference in ages among these three images of the same quasar? The quasar is six billion light years away, and I’m curious if the age difference is on the order of days, months, years, millennia.

Subquestion…

Can astronomers “increase the resolution” of the quasar by combining these three images together for study? Curious if more detail about the quasar can be known by virtue of the duplicate images, or if it’s too distant to matter.

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Posted: 4 months ago
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