Page 21 - GALIET PHYSICS BLOSSOMS III

if an EM wave were to move past a compact massive object like a neutron star. How do you think you would try to look at this?
When light passes through a 2-slit experiment, it looks as if two sources emit it, diffracting it, that is, diffraction is how a wave deflects or bends when it passes a corner or narrow gaps.
A neutron star is a giant atomic nuclei: a ball of neutrons created when massive star supernova’s iron core collapses. Neutron stars have a small 10-km radius, but they are far more massive than the sun, and 300,000 times as massive as the earth. They are size of a city or a small asteroid.20
According to General Relativity, the deflection is proportional to the mass M and inversely proportional to the distance R.21 Given that a neutron star is so dense and massive, it would have far more immense deflecting or bending effects on a passing EM wave than what was seen on the Brazilian sun-eclipse experiment above. So grand indeed, that even the preceding simple formula would not suffice, given that it is only valid for small deflections.
A neutron star would curve spacetime so enormously more than the sun ever would near its surface. Indeed, a neutron star’s spacetime curvature would generate an immense gravity field that, at best, it would bend or deflect a passing EM Wave to its closest vicinity creating so many diffractions, distortions and multiple images, and at worst, it would bend the EM wave into the neutron star pit itself, past the neutron star’s point of closest vicinity, devouring the EM Wave completely, or at least allowing only a few waves to deflect it, and escape it. In other words, the more massive the object: the more spacetime curvature and the more distortion and deflecting or diffraction and wave bending to the point of collapsing.
20 Chaisson, McMillan. Astronomy Today. Volume II. Stars and Galaxies. 540. 21 Chaisson, McMillan. Astronomy Today. Volume II. Stars and Galaxies. 565.
•21•