Star’s black hole encounter puts Einstein’s theory of gravity to the test

For more than 20 years, a team of astronomers has tracked a single star whipping around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy at up to 25 million kilometers per hour, or 3% of the speed of light. Now, the team says the close encounter has put Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to its most rigorous test yet for massive objects, with the light from the star stretched in a way not prescribed by Newtonian gravity. In a study announced today, the team says it has detected a distinctive indicator of Einstein’s general theory of relativity called “gravitational redshift,” in which the star’s light loses energy because of the black hole’s intense gravity.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

Star’s black hole encounter puts Einstein’s theory of gravity to the test

For more than 20 years, a team of astronomers has tracked a single star whipping around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy at up to 25 million kilometers per hour, or 3% of the speed of light. Now, the team says the close encounter has put Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to its most rigorous test yet for massive objects, with the light from the star stretched in a way not prescribed by Newtonian gravity. In a study announced today, the team says it has detected a distinctive indicator of Einstein’s general theory of relativity called “gravitational redshift,” in which the star’s light loses energy because of the black hole’s intense gravity.

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Makes logical sense doesn’t it

Cymek said:

> Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to its most rigorous test yet for massive objects.

Makes logical sense doesn’t it

I’m not sure that “most rigorous” makes sense, because distances are so large.

> For Genzel’s team, it proved to be a race to the VLT interferometric instrument, known as GRAVITY, ready in time. “We were always running up against the deadline. It was extremely stressful for the team,”

I can well believe it.

> Tests involving Sgr A* moves into the realm of extreme gravitational fields. “This mass scale is untested,”

The mass scale is untested but the gravitational field strength scale is well tested.

> Over the next year or two, they hope to see S2’s path begin to diverge very slightly from the one it followed 16 years ago.

Just like the perihelion advance of Mercury, well known 100 years ago.