General Relativity: Relativistic Gravity

• Big Al
• Principle of Equivalence
  an especially nice animation of the rocket experiment
• gravitational redshift verified in the lab: Pound & Rebka (1960)
• The first evidence for light bending: 1919 eclipse, reported to the Royal Society and in the New York Times
• More recent evidence on galactic scales: rings, galaxy clusters here and here

Relativistic Gravity: Light Bending

• basic idea
• The first test: bending of starlight by the Sun; reaction at the time
• Examples of gravitational lensing
  • source-lens-observer aligned: Einstein rings
  • misaligned: Einstein cross

Gravitational Microlensing and Milky Way Dark Matter

• Microlensing: theory
  lightcurve animations
• Microlensing: experiments
  • LMC search fields
  • MACHO LMC events: images, lightcurves
• direct detection of a microlens
• Implications for dark matter

Gravitational Lensing and Dark Matter in External Galaxies

• gallery of lensing by individual galaxies
• lensing by clusters of galaxies:
  Abell 1689, Abell 2218, 0024+1654, Abell 370 , SDSS J1004+4112
• the bullet cluster and dark matter