The Accidental Astrophysicists

An anonymous reader recommends a ScienceNews story that begins: "Dmitry Khavinson and Genevra Neumann didn't know anything about astrophysics. They were just doing mathematics, like they always do, following their curiosity. But five days after they posted one of their results on a preprint server, they got an email that said 'Congratulations! You've proven Sun Hong Rhie's astrophysics conjecture on gravitational lensing!'... Turns out that when gravity causes light rays to bend, it can make one star look like many. But until Khavinson and Nuemann's work, astrophysicists weren't sure just how many. Their proof in mathematics settled the question."

Comments

animation depicting gravitational lensing

[Anonymous Coward]

The wikipedia article on gravitational lensing has a neat animation produced with a numerical model. I wouldn't make it your desktop background though because it might warp your file icons.