Light from a star that exploded over 11 billion years ago was captured by Hubble Space Telescope not just as one postcard from the remote past but three messages that chronicle the fading fireball over a period of one week.

For starters, the feeble light from the supernova was amplified by the gravitational field of an enormous foreground galaxy cluster, Abell 370. The gravitational warp in space acts as a cosmic lens, bending and magnifying the light from the more distant supernova, which was located far behind the cluster.

A bonus for astronomers is that not one but three images of the supernova appear in the photo, strung along the cluster. They show the explosion over different times but all arrived at Hubble simultaneously. A clue is that the cooling supernova fireball appears in slightly different colors among the supernova images. The images arrived at different times because the length of the pathways the supernova light followed is different. The later images were delayed due to taking a longer route across "valleys" of warped space.