SDSSJ0946+1006 is an unusual gravitational lens system consisting of three galaxies at distances of respectively three, six, and eleven billion light years from Earth. In a report presented at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, researchers Raphael Gavazzi and Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Santa Barbara described the discovery of a double Einstein ring produced by the gravitational lensing of light from two distant galaxies. The observations were made using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The main lens lies at redshift z=0.222 , with the inner ring at z=0.609 with an Einstein radius RE=1.43±0.01 and magnitude m=19.784±0.006 , the outer ring is at z≲6.9 with RE=2.07±0.02 and magnitude m=23.68 ± 0.09 [1] The lensing galaxy is also known as SDSSJ0946+1006 L1, with the nearer lensed galaxy as SDSSJ0946+1006 S1, and the farther lensed galaxy SDSSJ0946+1006 S2.