To investigate the influence of gravity on the propagation of light, researchers usually have to examine astronomical length scales and huge masses. However, physicists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and Friedrich Schiller University Jena have shown that there is another way. In a recent issue of the journal Nature Photonics they find the answers to astronomical questions in the laboratory, shifting the focus to a previously underappreciated material property - surface curvature.
That's actually really cool.. Although it's nothing new that light can be bent, this is a good way to illustrate that it does the same thing in curved space (at least that's what I got from the article).
That makes me wonder -- I am NOT a physicist -- if when we look up at the stars, those stars and galaxies are not actually where we think they are.
I'm not the right kind of physicist to give the best answer, but I'm pretty sure that is sometimes the case. There are some pictures demonstrating gravitational lensing around galaxies or similar massive objects. An Einstein Cross here and there, too.
...sadly, I cannot provide any good citations, if you want them. I could look though.
While this is only somewhat related, I am reminded of this video. It is taken with a "femtosecond" camera (it shoots video at one trillion frames per second) that can, with some repetitive footage and processing, show the behavior of light when the video is slowed down by a factor of around 33 billion:
It's really an amazing visualization of how light behaves.
Gravitational lensing looks cool but the more amazing thing is just how many galaxies there are. Plus the size of the universe is probably much larger than the number of light years between us and the edge of the observable universe vs. the number of years the universe has existed.
Plus the gravitational lenses make a smiley face! Do I smell a new forums smiley in the making?
(This post was edited 8 years ago on Friday, January 15th, 2016 at 11:47 pm)
