Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by stormwyrm on Thursday August 02 2018, @04:44PM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Thursday August 02 2018, @04:44PM (#716322) Journal
    Scientific Laws are just statements that describe or predict various natural phenomena, essentially a distillation of the results of many observations and/or experiments. They aren't expected to give a mechanism or explanation for why they hold. For instance, we have Kepler's laws of planetary motion. They only say that the planets move the way they do: they don't explain why or how. If you want an explanation for why a law holds, you want a scientific theory. Newton's theory of universal gravitation suffices to explain Kepler's laws. There's also the Geiger-Nutall Law which relates the energy of alpha particles to the half-life of a radioactive nuclide. The quantum tunnelling theory of alpha decay is the corresponding theoretical explanation. The laws of thermodynamics are similar distillations of observations, and it's the theory of statistical mechanics among others that explains why those laws hold (e.g. entropy always increases because statistical mechanics says that there are in general many, many more disordered states than ordered ones, as such it is more likely to find a system in a state of higher disorder than lower).
    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=1, Informative=2, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5