Answer #258

The answer can be seen by clicking your mouse on the photograph below.

As you can see, the image created by a gravitational lens can become rather complicated. Here the image contains sections of the circle, but because the distant star is not co-linear the segments appear at an angle for part of the image time. A number of good references regarding gravitational lens models are given in our demonstration: Demonstration E1-21: GRAVITATIONAL LENS OPTICAL MODEL.


Archive 13

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