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Astronomy

Gravitational microlens in motion

Nature volume 414, pages 591–593 (2001)Cite this article

Astronomers have now imaged a stellar microlens as it speeds across the sky. A similar effect will soon allow them to measure the mass of a lens, whether dark or luminous.

In 1919, Arthur Eddington led a famous expedition1 to measure how much the Sun deflects light from distant stars during an eclipse. His results confirmed Einstein's prediction that gravity could bend light. This effect causes 'gravitational lensing', in which starlight is deflected by a suitable 'lens' — the Sun in Eddington's case. The lens can also be a distant galaxy or a nearby stellar-mass object. If the distorted images are so close together that they cannot be resolved as separate images, the effect is known as microlensing.

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Figure 1: A step-by-step guide to gravitational microlensing.

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  1. Department of Astronomy, Ohio State University, Columbus, 43210-1106, Ohio, USA

    Andrew P. Gould

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  1. Andrew P. Gould
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Correspondence to Andrew P. Gould.

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Gould, A. Gravitational microlens in motion. Nature 414, 591–593 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/414591a

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