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A gravitational lens is matter, such as a cluster of galaxies or a point particle, that bends light from a distant source as it travels toward an observer. The amount of gravitational lensing is described by Albert Einstein 's general theory of relativity .
The effects of foreground galaxy cluster mass on background galaxy shapes. The upper left panel shows (projected onto the plane of the sky) the shapes of cluster members (in yellow) and background galaxies (in white), ignoring the effects of weak lensing. The lower right panel shows this same scenario, but includes the effects of lensing.
In particular, gravitational lensing provides one way to measure the distribution of dark matter, which does not give off light and can be observed only by its gravitational effects. One particularly interesting application are large-scale observations, where the lensing masses are spread out over a significant fraction of the observable ...
Microlensing is caused by the same physical effect as strong gravitational lensing and weak gravitational lensing but it is studied by very different observational techniques. In strong and weak lensing, the mass of the lens is large enough (mass of a galaxy or galaxy cluster) that the displacement of light by the lens can be resolved with a ...
In weak gravitational lensing, the Jacobian is mapped out by observing the effect of the shear on the ellipticities of background galaxies. This effect is purely statistical; the shape of any galaxy will be dominated by its random, unlensed shape, but lensing will produce a spatially coherent distortion of these shapes.
The effect was first described by Einstein in 1907, [3] [4] eight years before his publication of the full theory of relativity. Gravitational redshift can be interpreted as a consequence of the equivalence principle (that gravitational effects are locally equivalent to inertial effects and the redshift is caused by the Doppler effect) [5] or ...
Gravitational lensing is an effect of gravitation, most commonly associated with General relativity. Subcategories. This category has the following 2 subcategories ...
The effect is an increase in inertia of a body when other masses are placed nearby. While not strictly a frame dragging effect (the term frame dragging is not used by Einstein), it is demonstrated by Einstein that it derives from the same equation of general relativity. It is also a tiny effect that is difficult to confirm experimentally.