Pulsar pair confirms Einstein’s theory of gravity
Before Einstein, people thought of gravity as a force pulling things down. But, in the early 20th century, Einstein's relativity theory said that gravity is what happens when massive objects bend the fabric of space and time. Since then, scientists have wondered if Einstein’s theory breaks down in places where gravity gets really strong. Research by Maura McLaughlin and other astronomers confirms Einstein's theory.
They call it “Einstein’s dream come true.”
Astronomers have confirmed Einstein’s theory of gravity using a pair of pulsars two thousand light years away.
Maura McLaughlin: It turns out that systems like this are kind of like Einstein’s dream come true, because we have these two extremely massive objects in orbit around each other, and we can measure all of these really cool relativistic effects that we can’t measure on Earth .
That’s astronomer Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University. She helped discover the pulsar pair. A pulsar is a burned-out star. It’s massive as our sun, but packed into the size of a city. McLaughlin told Earth & Sky that, as pulsars spin hundreds of times each second, they emit pulses of radio waves like the beacon of a lighthouse.
Maura McLaughlin: So we can predict with really incredible accuracy exactly what time we expect the next pulse from the pulsar to arrive. And we can see tiny little perturbations on the arrival times of the pulses due to effects predicted by Einstein, such as the warping of space-time. We can actually see that space-time is curved in the presence of these really massive objects.
McLaughlin said data from the double pulsar helped confirm Einstein’s general relativity theory to an accuracy of a fraction of a percent.
Our thanks today to Research Corporation, a foundation for the advancement of science.
Read the full interview featuring Maura McLaughlin from Earth & Sky’s 100 Scientists, 100 Stories.
More about the discovery of the double pulsar in 2003, from the Jodrell Bank Observatory.
Our thanks to:
Maura McLaughlin
Department of Physics
University of West Virginia
Morgantown, West Virginia
What a beautiful picture.
It is one of the best I’ve seen as well.
My new book (fiction), ‘The Ancient Order of Moridura’ (ISBN 1844264068), postulates a nascent singularity caused by a meteor impact creating a gravitational anomaly in Exremadura.
http://moridura.blogspot.com
The LHC experiments in 2008 may create black holes, however miniscule. (See Brookhaven NY lab gold atoms experiment 2005). If a black hole does result, it will boost my book sales, but the destruction of the solar system will make collection of royalties difficult.
Life’s a bitch sometimes —-
regards
Peter Curran
Edinburgh, Scotland
“... the destruction of the solar system will make collection of royalties difficult”
Thanks for stopping by, Peter :D
where finish the space and the time?
there is something further?
Can our biology understand?
the neurons think or we think through them?
I think in my modest opinion through my neurons,i
believe in the infinite adimensional universe of God.I do not think that the universe is the expansion
of the human dimensional brain,the universe for me is not an infinite dimensional box.Excuse me for my English.
Stefano Russo from Italy.
In their report “Tests of General Relativity from Timing the Double Pulsar” (Science, 6 October 2006, p. 97), Kramer et al. claim they have verified Einstein’s General Relativity Theory to an accuracy of 0.05% by four independent tests. See also Cho’s news story in Science, 15 September 2006, p.1556. The data present pulse timing measurements of the binary radio pulsar system PSR J0737-3039A/B for 2.5 years. In this paper the “masses” of the two pulsars were not determined directly (What is meant by the word “mass” used here and in most of current literature is “gravitational force,” see P. Spolter, “New Concepts in Gravitation,” Physics Essays 18, 37-50, 2005). The authors have assumed that Einstein’s equation for the advance of the perihelion, or periastron here is correct and they have calculated the presumed parameters. Furthermore, to fit the data with the theory they have accepted 68% confidence ranges, which is statistically not significant. Data presented in this paper do not support the authors’ claim. Observations of the rate of orbital period change of the 11-minute X-ray binary 4U 1820-30 for more than 13 years do not support loss of energy through gravitational radiation (J. Tan et al., Astrophys. J. 374, 291, 1991). No gravitational wave signals have been detected by the two 4 km long laser interferometers LIGO (B. Abbott et al., Class. Quantum Grav. 23, S29, 2006).
The concepts of Physics,(e.g.determinism,probabilism,relativism etc.),
may modify (or influence[to]), thought and behavior
of the people in the modern life?.
If you are able to remember your humanity etc…,
from the spiritual testament of Albert Einstein.
gravatar test
If einsteins theory on gravity true then why is andromeda colliding with the milky way.