Tag: general relativity

Astronomers witness the dragging of space-time in stellar cosmic dance

An international team of astrophysicists led by Australian Professor Matthew Bailes, from the ARC Centre of Excellence of Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), has shown exciting new evidence for ‘frame-dragging’—how the spinning of a celestial body twists space and time—after tracking the orbit of an exotic stellar pair for almost two decades. The data, which is further evidence for Einstein’s theory of…

A second black hole at our galaxy’s center?

There’s a supermassive black hole – 4 million times our sun’s mass – in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers who’ve measured star movements near this central black hole are now saying there might be a 2nd companion black hole near it. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/supermassive-black-hole-milky-way-galaxys-center-may-have-friend…

Shape of the universe: study could force us to rethink everything we know about the cosmos

No matter how elegant your theory is, experimental data will have the last word. Observations of the retrograde motion of the planets were fundamental to the Copernican revolution, in which the sun replaced Earth at the centre of the solar system. And the unusual orbit of Mercury provided a spectacular confirmation of the theory of general relativity. In fact, our entire…

Putting the ‘bang’ in Big Bang

Physicists have pondered how the cold, uniform matter of the inflationary early universe became the ultrahot, complex mixture of matter, space and time that led to the universe we know. New work simulates a bridge between cosmic inflation and … everything else. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/big-bang-simulation-inflation-reheating-period…

Physicists Simulate Critical ‘Reheating’ Period That Kickstarted the Big Bang

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Just before the Big Bang launched the universe onto its ever-expanding course, physicists believe, there was another, more explosive phase of the early universe at play: cosmic inflation, which lasted less than a trillionth of a second. During this period, matter — a cold, homogeneous goop — inflated exponentially quickly before processes of…

The Universe Is Made of Tiny Bubbles Containing Mini-Universes, Scientists Say

‘Spacetime foam’ might just be the wildest thing in the known universe, and we’re just starting to understand it. From a report: A persistent cosmological puzzle has been troubling physicists since 1917: what is the universe made of? Complicating this already-mind-boggling question is the fact that our best theories conflict with our observations of the universe. Albert Einstein, according to scientific…

Bridge between quantum mechanics and general relativity still possible

Quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity form the bedrock of the current understanding of physics—yet the two theories don’t seem to work together. Physical phenomena rely on relationship of motion between the observed and the observer. Certain rules hold true across types of observed objects and those observing, but those rules tend to break down at the quantum level,…

Black hole that ‘rings’ like a bell shows Einstein was right

Astronomers have looked at the way a black hole ‘rings’ like a bell to test a prediction of Einstein’s general relativity. Turns out Einstein is still right Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2216409-black-hole-that-rings-like-a-bell-shows-einstein-was-right/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Radio emission from a neutron star’s magnetic pole revealed by General Relativity

Pulsars in binary systems are affected by relativistic effects, causing the spin axes of each pulsar to change their direction with time. A research team led by Gregory Desvignes from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, has used radio observations of the source PSR J1906+0746 to reconstruct the polarised emission over the pulsar’s magnetic pole and to…