How on Earth do we know this? That those splotches of light are indeed galaxy clusters, & that their gravity is magnifying the space behind them, which allows us to see this most distant star?
-
-
-
Because Einstein was a smart guy.
-
Good enough. I'm convinced
-
Gravitational lensing is verified property of space hypothesized by Einstein after he derived the general relativity equation. He struggled to verify it, to prove the theory. His famous quote “imagination is more important than knowledge” came out is this chapter.
-
An Australian telescope once picked up mysterious radio signals. They called them 'Fast Radio Bursts'. Maybe they were coming from deep space, who knows. Even stranger, they occurred only in daytime. They were caused by an astronomer reheating his coffee in the microwave

-
So it would be a bummer if Ed didn't clean the scope.. But you can measure size and distance of objects by how distorted their light is & you can see the 'bubble' of the lens move across the sky. But nothing is certain in science or it isn't science
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0430-3 … -
I'm humbly silenced, & have some reading to do
-
Thanks for the great questions, they sent me down an interesting internet rabbit hole this morning!
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.