Quote:
Originally Posted by worth
Yes light bends around gravity. You can see it during a lunar eclipse, light will bend around the moon and distant stars will be shifted over a bit compared to when there is no moon in the way.
And yeah, you are encountering contradictions. Not sure if those have actually been answered by scientists or if they just chalk it up to one of those things.
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Rather than thinking of gravity as attracting mass, think of it as bent space. So the photons are shifted because space itself has curvature and they must follow the "straight" path along that geodesic. The idea of gravity being a force between two masses is somewhat incomplete, and is one of the things resolved by Einsteinian physics that was not by Newtonian; in fact the measure of the curvature of starlight around the sun was one of the compelling proofs of relativity, since the predicted curvature by the Theory of Relativity was correct and predictions by Newtonian physics were not.