Give Me a Minute to Explain How to Make a 270 Degree Triangle

Astronomers and Physicist are a fidgety bunch.

They often lack the know-how in regards to public communication. Granted they often don't need any particular capability in that realm given how astronomy's visual aspect is enough to get attention drawn towards it. However when dealing with ideas that at the for-front sound like they make no sense, that's where things get difficult.

This is why whenever I bring up "Bending Space", confusion is all that follows. It seems ridiculous, but much evidence is there to indicate that it is indeed a real thing and is happening everywhere. And it would explain various strange findings in the cosmos.

Here's the idea: Space, is not just an empty vacuum of nothing, in fact, space itself is a mass-less form that can be affected by what we know as, "matter". This is in the form of gravity, you see gravity is a very strange phenomenon, how does it even work?

Well according to Albert Einstein, gravity is indeed not an acting force pulling things in a certain direction. But instead it is the result of space itself being distorted by objects with mass. Illustrations are almost always set in the 2nd dimension, however while they are easier to understand, they often lead to confusion. Take this one as example:

It would seem apparent that as this picture shows, space is a 2 dimensional plane in which it is bent down, but there is no down in space, and space is 3 dimensions.

These illustrations demonstrate the idea. But put into three dimensions it becomes harder to understand how it even works.

See why they put it in 2 dimensions?

What these pictures are trying to show is how space bends inwards on objects with mass. The more mass, the more bending.

Gravity is the result of this, no you are not "falling" into anything. Instead you are actually traveling along a straight path in bent space. The earth is moving along its orbit and spinning at the same time. You move with it, and as you do so, you're body stays on the ground following that straight path. That's not to say you can't resist that path however.

When you jump, or throw something into the air, you are breaking the normal flow and moving outwards, then the space re-directs you back to the area where the space is the most bent. Theoretically that would be the core of the planet. But the pull is not strong enough to break the grounds. So you remain on the surface.

There is another result of this space-bending out there known as gravitational lensing.
When light of any kind gets close to a massive object we can observe light actually seeming to bend around it. This light is technically taking a straight path along with the curved space. This results in light being detectable from earth when normally it would be far too. . . far.

There is a photo which at first glance, seems like some kind of snap-capture error:

What you are actually seeing here is far more interesting. The two main objects in this photo are actually galaxies. As in the bright orange thing at the center and the blue ring. But the blue galaxy is not ring shaped, nor is it at a similar distance from earth as the orange one. Instead what is being seen here is the light from a blue galaxy behind the orange one, warped around the orange one by means of gravity. Allowing us to see a galaxy that would be hidden otherwise. This effect is actually what you see in many of the black hole depiction artworks.

Black holes bend space quite a bit, as result they would in theory, appear like this.

Lastly, one more cool thing to know about the bending of space is what I mentioned in this article's title.

Because of how space bends, it is not reliable to use basic geometry with long scale distances, at least in terms of theoretical travel or even how long light takes to reach us. A path with many curves in place due to space bending is going to be longer than a straight one. In fact, this bending of space is actually what astronomers are referring to in the discussion of space, "Expansion".

Expansion is not a good word to describe it because it implies it's expanding into something. When in reality what is happening is the space between galaxies is stretching at rate faster than light. This can happen because the galaxies aren't even moving, they are staying in place and the space around them is being stretched. (Although sometimes galaxies do move because of dark matter's gravitational influence.)

With hard bending of space, you could in theory have a "triangle", with 270 degrees.

Visualize this: You have a globe, you mark the north pole, then you draw a straight line down to the equator. Then you draw another line, this one being at a 90 degree angle to the other at the north pole. Draw this one down to the equator as well. Then connect the two ends. And there it is, a triangle, all three straight line and three intersecting corners. And it totals at 270 degrees.
If you had space bent to form some kind of concave form with perfect proportions. You could in theory have the same. Three lines that in space are straight, but in Euclidean space, (Geometric space), are curved.

Image origins:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/12/01/lisa_pathfinder_launch_tonight.html
http://van.physics.illinois.edu/QA/listing.php?id=16242
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/are-black-holes-real/