Light bending space

[Winter Man]

Just a quick thought that googling didn't turn up anything for: Energy and mass being interchangeable and all, do especially energetic photons bend space like a point mass would?

[Moon Goddess]

Throwing out my understanding of this....

Light has gravity, all gravity is bending space, so the basic answer to your question is yes.

However I think if your asking about bending space in the way of something like gravitational lensing. And for that to happen you'd have to have so much energy in one place it would be what we think of as matter, it would no longer be light.

[K^2]

Yes, light does bend space-time. Though, not quite in the same way that a massive point particle would. It has to do with the fact that if light has a lot of energy it also has a lot of momentum, and momentum factors into stress-energy tensor which is ultimately the source of gravity.

As a good example, there exists a Vaidya Metric, which is a solution for a star that radiates a lot of energy, and that radiated energy alters the gravitational field around the star.

[Winter Man]

Cheers for that. It just popped into my head as a 'I can't see why not' kind of thing and couldn't find any examples of it.

[Fuzzy Dunlop]

Yep light can bend space, in fact if you have enough light in the same place it can warp space so much it produces a black hole, called a Kugelblitz