An overview of the Chandra mission and goals, Chandra's namesake, top 10 facts.
Classroom activities, printable materials, interactive games & more.
Overview of X-ray Astronomy and X-ray sources: black holes to galaxy clusters.
All Chandra images released to the public listed by date & by category
Current Chandra press releases, status reports, interviews & biographies.
A collection of multimedia, illustrations & animations, a glossary, FAQ & more.
A collection of illustrations, animations and video.
Chandra discoveries in an audio/video format.
Q&A: Cosmology

Q:
We know light bends. How far does light have to travel to bend?

A:
Albert Einstein
Einstein's Theory of Relativity
Thanks for your question. Light does not have to travel astronomically large distances to be bent, there just needs to be a source of gravity to do the bending. Massive objects like black holes will bend light much more than light objects like planets. The Sun has been observed to bend the light of background stars by a small amount (this was the first confirmation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity). The bending of light has also been seen from very distant objects.

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