Science & Reason on Facebook: tinyurl.com Hubble’s Universe Unfiltered (Episode 5): Through a Lens, Brightly. Gravitational Lensing – A Black Hole Warps The Fabric Of Space-Time. Einstein’s theory of general relativity says that the presence of matter warps the space around it. The more matter there is, the stronger the warp. For really strong distortions of space-time, like black holes, the warping acts like a lens and markedly changes the path of light that passes through it. Such gravitational lenses have been found, and astronomers can use them to study very distant and very faint galaxies. Join us and see how the combination of a huge galaxy cluster and the observations from two space telescopes enable study of a galaxy whose light would otherwise be unobservable. — Please subscribe to Science & Reason: • www.youtube.com • www.youtube.com • www.youtube.com • www.youtube.com — Notes ► The title of this video podcast, “Through a lens, brightly” plays off the familiar phrase “through a lens, darkly,” which is a slightly shifted version of the phrase “through a glass, darkly.” Wikipedia reports that the phrase originally comes from the New Testament and is taken to mean that we have an imperfect view of our world and ourselves. The “glass” in the original version of the phrase is said to be a mirror (ie, a looking glass), and not a glass lens. Hence, the shifted version that I have used, in order to evoke the idea of a gravitational lens, is a misinterpretation of …

Tags: Black, Fabric, Hole, SpaceTime, Warps