gravitational-lens

noun Astronomy.

a heavy, dense body, as a galaxy, that lies along our line of sight to a more distant object, as a quasar, and whose gravitational field refracts the light of that object, splitting it into multiple images as seen from the earth.

Origin:
1975–80

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World English Dictionary

gravitational lens

—n
	astronomy a lenslike effect in which light rays are bent when passing through the gravitational field of such massive objects as galaxies or black holes

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
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American Heritage

Science Dictionary

gravitational lens
A massive celestial object, such as a galaxy, whose gravity can act as a lens that functions to bend and focus the light of a more distant object. This results in a magnified, distorted, or multiple image of the original light source for a distant observer.

Matching Quote

"Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera lens and the eye both register images—because of their sensitivity to light—at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists. The essential character of this preservation is not dependent upon the image being static; unedited film rushes preserve in essentially the same way. The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except, in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory."

-John Berger

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