British astronomers did the heavy lifting, traveling to Brazil and Principe to take photos of stars close to the Sun during an eclipse. “Scientists were skeptical and the total solar eclipse was a great opportunity to really put Einstein’s theory through its paces. The proof that light is deflected was gathered 100 years ago today.

Ripples in space-time called gravitational waves are produced when stars explode or collide.Light beams curve as they pass through curved space-time.Gravity is a symptom of that distortion and curvature, it’s not a natural innate force.Space is not flat: all objects with mass distort and curve space-time, so the sun changes the geometry of space-time around it.It was a new theory of gravity that fixed a lot of the problems with Newtonian gravity, but scientists are trained to be skeptical. “But Einstein introduced math into the notion of space-time for the first time, and he was able to predict that light beams would curve and that ripples in space-time, called gravitational waves, were produced when stars explode or collide. The holes in Newtonian gravity had already been punched for a while, and the idea of space-time had also been developed a few decades earlier,” says Macdonald. “A lot of Einstein’s scientific theories were driven by thought experiments about current problems in science. So the curvature of space-time dictates the motion of objects in our Universe, even massless objects like photons or light particles that travel in a straight line through curved space-time.” Remember that last part. “The briefest way to summarize it is that mass curves space-time, which in turn tells mass how to move. “The bowling ball on the trampoline is the image most people are comfortable with: you introduce mass (the bowling ball) to this fabric and it's going to dip down,” she says. The metaphor: a bowling ball on a trampoline Elements of this image furnished by NASA.

3D illustration Sun gravity bends space around it.

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