Gravitational lensing explained! 👩🏻‍🏫 Anything that has a mass warps the underlying fabric of the universe: spacetime. This animation shows how light moves around an object warping spacetime, then around a cluster of galaxies. When light passes close to something as massive as a galaxy cluster, its intense gravity bends and magnifies light from even more distant objects behind it, making them appear brighter, stretched, or even duplicated. This phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, lets u

Gravitational lensing happens because mass curves space-time, and light always follows the straightest possible path through space-time. 🔔Follow: @inspiredstarlab for more! When a massive object (like a galaxy or black hole) sits between us and a distant light source, the curved space around it bends the light’s path, making the background object look distorted, magnified, or even multiplied. Video animation credit: The Baain Maze ( Pinterest) 🌐CREDIT COMPOSITION/FORMATTING/FURTHER PROCESSING