eli5: How do you see light behind a star? And how does a star bends light?
In: Planetary Science
It doesn’t bend light. It bends space. Everything that has mass bends space. The more massive, and the more dense an object is, the more it bends space.
Light travels in a straight line. Space, itself, is curved by mass, so while it may seem that light is being bent around things, it’s actually always going in a straight line as far as space goes.
A photon is both created and absorbed at the exact same time. A photon does not experience time. Our perception of how long it takes for light to travel distances is just that. It’s our perception, and that’s the reason for all the anomalies we perceive in light.
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