APOD: 2022 May 11 - Gravity s Grin

Good morning, Rallypoint, and welcome to the May 11th Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD): "Gravity's Grin." We continue yesterday's cat theme with a favorite of mine from the APOD archives (last appearing in October 2019). Einstein first proposed that a sufficient mass positioned between a light source and an observer could be large enough to bend the light waves from the source as they traveled to the observer. He called this 'gravitational lensing.' We see an example of this phenomenon here in this image of the Cheshire Cat galaxy group in the constellation Ursa Major (Great Bear, aka the Big Dipper). Remember that we are not just looking across the street; this Cheshire Cat is over 6 billion light years away from Earth.

Who said science can't have an element of whimsy, if not fun?