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Gravitational Lensing

In the Face Book group:
The post was about gravitational lensing.
My comment:

Another story about gravitational lensing for high red shift objects. The theory in this story is that even though a proton in light has no mass it is still affected by gravity - a force between masses, but Einstein proposed the light can be bent by space time curvature. In the story astronomers are analyzing the flickers of two adjacent distant light sources, supposedly one light source split in two by a 'meddling galaxy's gravitational field' (both bent points of light are very conveniently observed with separation and oddly the flicker in one point is different than the flicker in the other ) in an attempt to better resolve red shift distances.
There are alternatives for this observed flicker: (a) the two individual light sources are flickering (and that is why the two flicker differently), or (b) - the one chosen by the astronomers - the meddling gravitational field is flickering though the bent light beams are not affected the same. The story has no explanation for how the force of gravity from a galaxy fluctuates. Since the force of gravity is directly related to the two masses and their distance, which one of these two values is flickering on a galactic scale??

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