Should also mention that this is a short followup to our first paper on SPHEREx quasar discovery from last month, wherein we found ~300 bright quasars via their broad H-alpha line (among others) up to z~5.7, arxiv.org/abs/2603.10135. Excited to see what people find in the full data release!

Paper day! We have discovered the brightest strong gravitational lens on the sky: 15th mag! "Persephone's Torch" is a quad quasar which was hiding in plain sight. But no longer, thanks to SPHEREx full-sky spectro-photometry +LBT. Congrats @freddavies.bsky.social #astronomy arxiv.org/abs/2604.13152