Tony Tyson and Ayana Holloway (Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs/LSST)

According to the General Theory of Relativity, mass warps spacetime. When light travels through space, its path is bent if it passes near a large concentration of matter. Thus, massive objects in the universe can act like huge magnifying glasses, distorting and concentrating light traveling around and through them. This effect is called gravitational lensing and this movie shows how it might work in a cluster of hundreds of galaxies.

Strong gravitational lensing

When light rays from a distant source bend around both sides of a massive object and cross near Earth, the effect is called strong gravitational lensing. Strong lensing magnifies and distorts light from the source, and in some cases also produces multiple images of the source. This movie shows a simulation of strong lensing by a massive cluster of galaxies containing huge amounts of both visible matter and dark matter. The light distortion effects are exaggerated in the movie, but generally speaking such effects are common since rich clusters of galaxies are the largest concentrations of matter in the universe. In fact, the patterns of distortion help astronomers determine the amount of dark matter in clusters, and how that matter is spread in the cluster, both of which tell a great deal about the behavior of matter in the cosmos as a whole.

Austin Reiter