Einstein Was Right

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Einstein Was Right! Scientists Confirm General Relativity Works With Distant Galaxy
By Chelsea Gohd, Space.com Staff Writer | June 21, 2018 02:20pm ET

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A new study validates Einstein's theory of general relativity in a distant galaxy for the first time.

This study supports our current understanding of gravity and provides more evidence for the existence of dark matter and dark energy — two mysterious concepts that scientists know about only indirectly by observing their effects on cosmic objects.

Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, published in 1916, explains how gravity is the result of a concept known as the fabric of space-time. Simply put, the theory predicts how much the mass of an object — in this case, a galaxy — curves space-time.

Since the theory was first published, it has been tested a number of times within our solar system. But this new study, conducted by an international team of astronomers led by Thomas Collett of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., is the first precise test of general relativity on a large astronomical scale, the researchers said.

Using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, the research team found that gravity behaves the same way in a faraway galaxy as it does in our solar system — just as Einstein's theory predicts.

The researchers tested the assumption that "the same laws of physics we see working here on Earth are true anywhere else," Terry Oswalt, an astronomer and chair of physical sciences at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, said in an email to Space.com. Verifying general relativity "at all possible scales (especially the largest scale) is fundamentally important to physics as a whole, and to cosmology in particular," added Oswalt, who was not involved in the new study.

In validating general relativity, the findings also serve as additional evidence for the existence of dark matter and dark energy, Collett told Space.com. Dark matter and dark energy are two of the "weird things" that exist in the standard model of cosmology, Collett said.

The standard model is a theory which describes how fundamental forces and particles in the universe work and behave together, and it aims to explain our observations and experiments. However, our lack of understanding and explanation of dark matter and dark energy, "the two biggest mysteries in cosmology today," according to Oswalt, lead some to question the standard model.

The work was published June 21 in the journal Science.