Strong and Weak Lensing (IMAGE)

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Strong and Weak Lensing

Caption

A spectacular example of strong gravitational lensing is the nearby galaxy cluster Abell 2218 (top), in which the visible distortion of individual background galaxies can be used to measure the mass of the lensing structure. The weak lensing of fainter and more distant structures must be detected by statistical averaging (bottom).

Credit

(Abell 2218 image by NASA, weak lensing simulation by Bhuvnesh Jain, Uroš Seljak, and Simon White)

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