Black holes bend light in strange ways

Ever notice that when you put an oar in the water, it looks like it's bent upward? Or, when you look at someone standing up to their knees in water, they look short? The physics principle behind this is refraction: light "bends", or changes direction, when it passes a boundary between two different media, like water and air. When light is bent, it it creates the illusion that an object is out of place.

Albert Einstein was first to realize that light can also be bent around stars; the intense gravity of a star can refract light. If light from a distant source passes a star, the path of the light bends, causing observers on earth to get the wrong idea about where the light came from.

Black holes have intense gravity, in fact the strongest we know of, and scientists recently determined that black holes can bend light in directions that don't jive with our understanding of normal refraction. This adds another item to the list of baffling black hole phenomenon. Link.