Q&A: Cosmology
Q:
We know light bends. How far does light have to travel to bend?
A:
Thanks for your question. Light does not have to travel astronomically
large distances to be bent, there just needs to be a source of gravity to
do the bending. Massive objects like black holes will bend light much more
than light objects like planets. The Sun has been observed to bend the
light of background stars by a small amount (this was the first
confirmation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity). The bending of
light has also been seen from very distant objects.
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