Friday, April 05, 2013

Bending Light

There is little cooler than bending light, its one of the magic runes in our forthcoming C&C book Rune Lore . . . Bending Light. The concept is just plain cool. In Einstein's General Theory of Relativity he speaks of a gravitational force powerful enough to either, directly or indirectly, bend light. The idea seems far fetched but the reality is much cooler than any fantasy concept we can concoct (well except for maybe mermaids, dragons and  rocket propelled swords aka the Sword and the Sorcerer).

And here it is in the universe.  Nasa's Keplar Telescope saw it. What it saw was a small, dead, massively dense white dwarf star locked in perpetual orbit with a giant, dying red dwarf star. The giant red dwarf is actually locked in the smaller star's orbit; whenever the one passed in front of the other, the super hot white dwarf grabbed the light of the red and bent it, brightening it significantly, and hurled it on its way.

Bending light.

No comments:

Plywood Memories from Gencon to Vegas

  Out trip to Gencon took us up through the Arkansas Delta country, and into the boot of Missouri, across the Big Muddy and on into the spra...