Stars Orbiting a Supermassive Black Hole May Have Finally Confirmed General Relativity

If you really, really want to scrutinise the limits of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, there’s a unique testing ground you ought to know about, although it’s a little out of the way.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

Stars Orbiting a Supermassive Black Hole May Have Finally Confirmed General Relativity

If you really, really want to scrutinise the limits of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, there’s a unique testing ground you ought to know about, although it’s a little out of the way.

more…

Good.

“The galactic centre – the heart of the Milky Way, some 26,000 light-years from Earth – hosts a supermassive black hole with a mass 4 million times that of the Sun. … Researchers analysed some 20 years of observation data from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other sources to analyse the movements of three stars in orbit around Sagittarius A*, and the motion of one of these – called S2 – doesn’t match up with the predictions of Newtonian gravity.”

“S2 is a 15-solar-mass star that loops around Sagittarius A* in an elliptical orbit that takes almost 16 years to complete. Once every orbit it passes extremely close to the supermassive black hole –within about 17 light-hours, which is around 120 times the distance between the Sun and the Earth. We probed the data with what we expected from relativity, and saw very strong indications here that we got the expected answer.”

This phenomena has been known for 200 or so years. It’s the same effect that causes the anomalous precession of the planet Mercury. Seeing it that far away in the orbit of a star about a supermassive black hole is wonderful. Only the ESO VLT has the precision to do this, the Hubble and Keck Telescopes aren’t good enough on their own.