Gravitational lensing is all the rage these days! The fact that massive objects have gravity that bends lights was a prediction by Einstein, but it has come into its own over the past few years as a way of learning more about the Universe. We've used it to map dark matter, and to find planets orbiting other stars. The more lenses we find, the better we can map out the distant Universe. And now Hubble has found new ones. 67 of them, in fact!
Gravity bends the path light takes in a similar manner in which a car has to follow a dip in the road. Gravity warps space, and a beam of light follows that warp. Galaxies have lot of mass, and therefore a lot of gravity. Imagine a distant galaxy, billions of light years away. Between us and it is another galaxy, much closer to us. The distant ...
