"The future of humanity lies in space exploration", There are many a folk who confide with this idea including the biggest of space organizations on Earth.
So, what's the most important thing required for space exploration? Something to explore of course!
There are many new astronomical findings now a days. We have discovered Exoplanets around our solar system including some rouge Exoplanets. The telescopes that are being used in these discoveries are advancing much quicker than the past few decades and now a new scientific technology is going to support our space exploration; Gravitational Lensing.
In general relativity, the presence of matter (energy density) can curve spacetime, and the path of a light ray will be deflected as a result. This process is called gravitational lensing and in many cases can be described in a similar way to the deflection of light by lenses (like glass) in optics. Many useful results for cosmology (astronomy) have come out of using this property of matter and light.
(Quantitatively the matter bending space is moving slowly relative to C, the speed of light and the gravitational potential)
Hard to digest, huh?
In simple words:
Matter (any kind of, especially heavy) like stars, black holes and other stellar objects bends the space-time fabric into a curvature and the light coming along towards the curved space-time bends near the curvature of space-time as it does near a curved convex or concave lens, and this deflected light when detected shows us what lies beyond what our normal optics can visualize.
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Visualised Gravitational Lensing The light from source bends due to the high gravitational potential of the massive object and hits the focus and it appears at the apparent position |
The telescope which is planning to use this method for detection of other far lying galaxies and cosmic objects is the James Webb Space Telescope.
- Vamsi K
For Part II and more updates about science and technology stay tuned TECHGUYZZARENA
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