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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: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday August 02 2018, @02:16PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 02 2018, @02:16PM (#716224) Journal

    A theory, in science, is typically composed of multiple laws, and a supporting framework of understanding for how those laws work.

    There is, for example, within relativity, a law of mass-energy equivalence. It's a piece that the whole needs to work.

    It doesn't seem like if you took mass-energy equivalence away, and declared it invalid, that time dilation would cease to be a meaningful concept, but E=MC2 governs the way in which two different frames of reference can see the same body at 2 different kinetic energy levels, but total energy levels the same. And without that, there'd be no way for 2 different frames of reference to see events flow at a different rate. And without that, there'd be no way to describe time dilating for one point.

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