Trevor Collins

bend around it like a lens, collapse back in on the other side, and then come to us looking like it's magnified.

So you can literally use the gravity, the mass of a black hole or a galaxy, and you can use that as a magnifying glass to look at and listen to things on the other side.

You following?

Basically, in this case, they're saying the radio waves were emitted by something normal.

just a light burst, nothing super strong, but they happened to pass by something with an incredible mass could be a star, could be a black hole, could be another galaxy.

And it perfectly came by rap like the radio waves bent around that mass and magnified.

So that way, when it hit us, it looked like a uniquely strong radio signal, but actually it was just like an amped up normal signal.

Yeah, yeah.

And especially once you get to relativity, once things start traveling near or at the speed of light, game over, man.

I think when a photon... Okay, I don't want to speak out of turn because a photon moves at the speed of light and because of that, time essentially freezes.

So a photon, I think, collides with its destination at the same time as it's emitted in a weird way relative to the particle.

I don't want to speak out of turn.

Relativity gets very weird when you go to the speed of light.

There's essentially like a singularity at that.

I'm geeking out.

Sorry, I'll get back to what we're talking about.

Basically, what's happening is, you know, you take a magnifying glass into the sun and you move it down to a piece of paper.

You take that normal light and you focus it into something stronger that could maybe help you create a fire.

It's possible that the magnifying glass in this case is some sort of celestial object

taking background noise and amplifying it to the point that when we get it here on Earth, it sounds outlandishly loud.