Tuesday, July 31, 2018

It Keeps Going, and Going, and Going...

Measurements of a fast-moving star have provided another instance of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity accurately describing the universe.

Scientific teams watched a star as it moved around the super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy (Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*). They then measured what they saw against what several different theories of gravity said they would see if those theories were accurate. The star's motion made it a good candidate because the immense gravity of Sgr A* made it move pretty quickly. The different theories predicted different things would happen and those differences are more apparent at higher speeds than lower ones.

Einstein's general relativity provided predictions that matched the observations. Not bad for the 100-year-old side project of a Swiss patent clerk.

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