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Who led the 1919 expeditions that measured the deflection of starlight near the Sun?
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gravity
A galactic cluster, about five billion light-years away, produces a tremendous gravitational field that “bends” light around it. This lens produces multiple copies of a blue galaxy about twice as distant. Four images are visible in a circle surrounding the lens; a fifth is visible near the center of the picture, which was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The 1919 expeditions to measure the deflection of starlight near the Sun were led by two prominent astronomers:
- Arthur Eddington led the expedition to the island of Príncipe, off the coast of West Africa.123
- Andrew Crommelin, of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, led the expedition to Sobral, Brazil.2
These expeditions were organized by British astronomers to test a key prediction of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: that gravity would cause light from distant stars to bend as it passed near the Sun. By comparing photographs of the stars taken during the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, with reference images of the same region of space, the teams provided observational evidence that supported Einstein's theory, helping to establish him as a leading physicist of his time.123