Any good scientific theory needs to be rigorously tested, and a group of dozens of scientists from around the world have spent more than 15 years doing just that. | stuartlayt
An international team of researchers, including astronomers from Australia, have completed a 16-year experiment showing that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is still accurate.More than 100 years ago, renowned scientist Albert Einstein proposed General Relativity as a way of combining his theory of spacetime with the theory of gravity.
The researchers observed a pair of pulsars rapidly spinning around each other – they orbit each other in just 147 minutes with velocities of about 1 million km/h. “Because they’re very massive and moving very fast you see a bunch of effects you don’t see every day in terms of gravity on Earth,” he said.“But they’re also quite small, so you need very precise tests to see these small differences.”The pulsars are both about 30 per cent more massive than the Sun but only about 24 kilometres across, meaning they exert huge gravitational influence on each other and the surrounding space.
“Apart from gravitational waves and light propagation, our precision allows us also to measure the effect of ‘time dilation’ that makes clocks run slower in gravitational fields.” Professor Deller said, despite their experiment seeming to prove the theory is correct, he fully expected it to be eventually replaced with a different theory to explain the universe.
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