• Question: if you got to come into a school and teach us what would you do

    Asked by mia to MariaMagdalena, Ashley, Bernard, Carsten, Monique on 16 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Monique Henson

      Monique Henson answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      I think I’d probably do some on gravitational lensing. When I was in school, I learnt that light always travels in straight lines – but that’s not always true. When light travels past really massive objects, it bends. This effect is called gravitational lensing. It creates weird and wonderful images like this and this, but it also helps us to figure out where all the dark matter in the Universe is. Some scientists are now trying to use it to figure out what dark energy is too.

      I think it would be pretty cool to run a workshop on that. You’d get to learn about spacetime and how it is distorted by matter to cause gravitational lensing.

Comments