Imagine you have a super-duper bouncy ball, like a superball. It’s so bouncy that it can even bounce off the ceiling. Now, think about the floor as space, and the ball as a beam of light. Normally, the ball goes in a straight line.
But what if the floor wasn’t flat? What if it was curved like a big slide? If you roll the ball on the curved slide, it won’t go straight; it will follow the curve of the slide, right? Well, light does something similar when it travels near something very, very heavy, like a super heavy star.
These super heavy things, like black holes, make space act like a curved slide. So when the light goes near them, it doesn’t go straight anymore; it follows the curve of space just like the bouncy ball on the slide. That’s why we say light gets “pulled” by gravity. It’s not because light is heavy; it’s because space itself is curved by the heavy things, and light follows the curve.
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