Fatima Abdurrahman, Doctoral Candidate, Astronomy Department, UC Berkeley

Gravitational Lensing: Bends in Spacetime

100 years ago, Einstein predicted that light rays would deviate from straight-line paths in the space near massive objects. Today, we use this fact to weigh galaxies, discover planets of other stars, and “see” invisible black holes. How did this idea of gravitational lensing come about, and how do we use it today to probe all fields of astrophysics?

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