This the most exciting astronomical development I've heard about for several years. One gets the impression that there might be perspectives like this all over the place, much as the discovery of the first few exoplanets was followed by an avalanche of others.

Am I right in thinking that the temporal offsets of the gravitational lensing allow for a sort of controlled experiment, eg where astronomers study the oldest image of the supernova and form hypotheses about its development, then test those hypotheses against the later ones?