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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 02 2018, @01:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the one-way-spaghettification dept.

Observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope have for the first time revealed the effects predicted by Einstein's general relativity on the motion of a star passing through the extreme gravitational field near the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. This long-sought result represents the climax of a 26-year-long observation campaign using ESO's telescopes in Chile.

[...] The new measurements clearly reveal an effect called gravitational redshift. Light from the star is stretched to longer wavelengths by the very strong gravitational field of the black hole. And the change in the wavelength of light from S2 agrees precisely with that predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. This is the first time that this deviation from the predictions of the simpler Newtonian theory of gravity has been observed in the motion of a star around a supermassive black hole.


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 02 2018, @05:48PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 02 2018, @05:48PM (#716352) Journal

    "Law" has fallen out of use for scientific statements, because theories cannot be proven, only falsified. Also because there's no presumed "law giver".

    If a theory cannot be tested for falsification (not necessarily at the moment, but in principle) then it's not a scientific statement. But you can't test a theory everywhere in the universe at every time, so there's no possibility of being able to prove that it is correct. All you can show is "it fits all the evidence, and it predicts things we haven't tested yet".

    In practice, even when a theory is shown wrong by experiment, the first thing that gets checked is whether there was something wrong with the experiment. Or whether there's some other factor in action that explains the result. Usually even a better theory can't replace a generally accepted theory until those committed to it retire.

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