Magnificent Hubble image of a cluster warping space and stripping gas

The Universe is filled with a lot of weird stuff, but one of the weirdest phenomena is gravitational lensing.

I've written about it before

Briefly, gravitational lensing is when the gravity of a massive object — a star, a black hole, a galaxy — bends space around it, causing light passing by to curve, like a car following the curve of a road. Einstein [wrote about this in relation to his work on Relativity], saying that matter bends space and we perceive this bending as gravity. So we call thi...