Gravitational lensing is the phenomenon of bending of light by massive objects in between the observer , and a source of light which can be a distant star. It is a direct prediction of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, and was tested and confirmed by Sir Arthur Eddington during the famous Solar eclipse back in the yea 1919, where the apparent position of a star very close to the sun was observed at a different location - the exact position was successfully predicted by General Theory of Relativity.
In actual this phenomena is used by astronomers to calculate a stars position and also had been used to measure the accelerating expansion of our universe.
There are many situations which can give rise to gravitational lensing. These regimes are:
Strong Lensing
Strong lensing is the most visually stunning form of gravitational lensing, and as its name suggests, requires an extremely massive object, and a good deal of alignment between the lens and the source. Galaxy clusters are the most common cause of strong gravitational lensing. Partial arcs, full arcs and multiple images are all strong gravitational lensing features one can observe. Some of the most commonly studied objects producing strong gravitational lensing features are the clusters of stars.
Strong lensing features like arcs and rings are typically due to extended objects (like background galaxies which are not part of the cluster itself), and multiple-image (mostly quad-image systems) are typically objects like background quasars.
Weak Lensing
Weak gravitational lensing occurs much more frequently than strong lensing. Lenses can be clusters (in their outer regions), individual galaxies, or even large scale structure in the universe. Weak lensing is not a noticeable effect by eye, rather, it has to be done statistically. Ellipticities of a field of background galaxies are observed on a grid, and are statistically averaged together to create the weak lensing signal. Shape distortions of these background galaxies due to lensing are on the percent scale. One important assumption is made, however, and that is that galaxies' isophotes (lines of constant light) are elliptical, and their orientations are completely random. With that, any net tangential shearing produced is due to gravitational lensing. In the image below (from upper left to bottom right), the upper left frame shows an unlensed field of circular galaxies, and to its immediate right shows the effect of lensing. The image in the bottom right has added shape noise (a 'realistic' field of background galaxies), and to its right is how the field would lens.
Microlensing
Microlensing is a regime of lensing which is most common on the scale of the Milky Way galaxy. This can occur when background stars pass behind foreground stars. Microlensing is actually strong enough to produce multiple images of the background star, but since the image separations are so small (micro-arcsecond scale - hence the name), what we observe (since an angular resolution of a micro-arcsecond is tough to achieve) is a change in the flux as the object moves into and out of alignment with the intermediate massive object. Interestingly, microlensing has actually proven useful in detecting planets around stellar lensing systems.
Image source : https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dh9Af.gif
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