Gravitational Lensing

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Gravitational lensing: Light around a massive object, such as a Galaxy, Star, black hole, is
bent, causing it to act as a lens for the things that lay behind it. Astronomers routinely use this
method to study stars and galaxies behind massive objects.
The deflection of light by gravity is responsible for a new class of astronomical phenomena. If a
massive object is situated between the astronomer and a distant target object with appropriate
mass and relative distances, the astronomer will see multiple distorted images of the target.
Such effects are known as gravitational lensing.
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Depending on the configuration, scale, and
mass distribution, there can be two or more images, a bright ring known as an Einstein ring, or
partial rings called arcs.
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The earliest example was discovered in 1979;
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since then, more
than a hundred gravitational lenses have been observed.
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Even if the multiple images are too
close to each other to be resolved, the effect can still be measured, e.g., as an overall
brightening of the target object; a number of such "microlensing events" have been observed.
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Gravitational lensing has developed into a tool of observational astronomy.



Additional Information:

http://astro.berkeley.edu/~jcohn/lens.html

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