Lecture

Light Deflection and Gravitational Lensing

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In courses (2)

PHYS-427: Relativity and cosmology I

Introduce the students to general relativity and its classical tests. ...

PHYS-428: Relativity and cosmology II

This course is the basic introduction to modern cosmology. It introduces students to the main concepts and formalism of cosmology, the observational status of Hot Big Bang theory and discusses major physical processes in the early Universe. ...

Description

This lecture covers exercises related to light deflection and gravitational lensing. The first exercise involves deriving the trajectory in a spherically symmetric potential and understanding the concept of monovistic particles. The second exercise focuses on calculating the deflection angle of light rays near massive bodies, such as the sun, using general relativity. The final exercise explores the role of massive bodies as gravitational lenses, affecting the path of light from a distant source to an observer. Through these exercises, students will gain a deeper understanding of how gravity influences the path of light in the universe.

Instructor

Victor Gorbenko

Teaching & PhD PhD Students Jonas Dujava, Anders Wallberg, Mattia Varrone, Aleksandr Zhabin, Veronica Sacchi Courses Classical electrodynamics PHYS-324 The goal of this course is the study of the physical and conceptual consequences of Maxwell equations. Relativity and cosmology II PHYS-428 This course is the basic introduction to modern cosmology. It introduces students to the main concepts and formalism of cosmology, the observational status of Hot Big Bang theory and dis

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Physics

Relativity: General relativity

Related concepts (32)

Gravitational lens

A gravitational lens is a distribution of matter (such as a cluster of galaxies) or a point particle between a distant light source and an observer that is capable of bending the light from the source as the light travels toward the observer. This effect is known as gravitational lensing, and the amount of bending is one of the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Treating light as corpuscles travelling at the speed of light, Newtonian physics also predicts the bending of light, but only half of that predicted by general relativity.

Gravitational wave

Gravitational waves are waves of the intensity of gravity that are generated by the accelerated masses of an orbital binary system, and propagate as waves outward from their source at the speed of light. They were first proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and then later by Henri Poincaré in 1905 as waves similar to electromagnetic waves but the gravitational equivalent. Gravitational waves were later predicted in 1916 by Albert Einstein on the basis of his general theory of relativity as ripples in spacetime.

Gravitational redshift

In physics and general relativity, gravitational redshift (known as Einstein shift in older literature) is the phenomenon that electromagnetic waves or photons travelling out of a gravitational well (seem to) lose energy. This loss of energy corresponds to a decrease in the wave frequency and increase in the wavelength, known more generally as a redshift. The opposite effect, in which photons (seem to) gain energy when travelling into a gravitational well, is known as a gravitational blueshift (a type of blueshift).

Gravitational potential

In classical mechanics, the gravitational potential at a point in space is equal to the work (energy transferred) per unit mass that would be needed to move an object to that point from a fixed reference point. It is analogous to the electric potential with mass playing the role of charge. The reference point, where the potential is zero, is by convention infinitely far away from any mass, resulting in a negative potential at any finite distance.

Gravitational energy

Gravitational energy or gravitational potential energy is the potential energy a massive object has in relation to another massive object due to gravity. It is the potential energy associated with the gravitational field, which is released (converted into kinetic energy) when the objects fall towards each other. Gravitational potential energy increases when two objects are brought further apart. For two pairwise interacting point particles, the gravitational potential energy is given by where and are the masses of the two particles, is the distance between them, and is the gravitational constant.

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