Astronomers have shown how gravitational lensing allows us to see the faintest and most distant galaxies, helping us to understand the origin of the Universe. The first gravitational lens, a ...

Scientists have observed a supernova explosion from 4 billion light years away in an extreme case of gravitational lensing—where distant objects are magnified by galaxies bending the light emitted ...

It’s always amazing, and more than a little humbling, when the universe reminds us that our “common sense” is provincial, falling apart on cosmic scales. If you’re on the surface of Earth—and I’m ...

When light moves from air into glass or plastic it is refracted close refractionProcess by which a wave changes speed and sometimes direction upon entering a denser or less dense medium, eg a light ...

Fundamentally, a microscope comprises two subsystems: an illumination system to illuminate the sample and an imaging system that produces a magnified image of the light that has interacted with the ...

Optical microscopy is a very useful technique to examine the appearance of a sample with greater detail, but there are some limitations that provide a boundary to its use in practice. Cross section of ...