The way light spins actually changes how it curves around a black hole, making those famous "Einstein Rings" look slightly lopsided.
arXiv · March 18, 2026 · 2603.15697
The Takeaway
We usually assume gravity treats all light the same way, but researchers found that light's 'spin' causes it to shift sideways as it passes massive objects. This means perfectly circular rings of light are actually impossible, a discovery that could force astronomers to rethink how they map the dark matter in the universe.
From the abstract
The optical Magnus effect refers to transverse shift of a trajectory of light caused by its polarization and appears as a correction to geometrical optics at the linear order in wavelength. Here, we start from Maxwell's equations in a curved spacetime to derive the equation of motion for a wave packet of circularly polarized light, which confirms the known result involving the helicity-dependent anomalous velocity with some generalization and clarification. We then study possible consequences of