Albert Einstein's theory of relativity has stood the test of time and a recent study by an international team of astronomers showed that even some 7,000 light years of space, the theory is still correct.
The experiment, published in the April 26 issue of Science, involved observing a massive, fast-spinning star called a pulsar, and its companion white dwarf - a smaller but very dense star that is dying, having lost most of its outer layers - doing a dizzying orbital dance.
According to the study, the experiment showed gravity crumpled spacetime in just the way Albert Einstein predicted in his theory first published in 1915.
"The unusual pair of stars is quite interesting in its own right but we've learned it is also a unique laboratory for testing the limits of one of our most fundamental physical theories, general relativity" says University of Toronto astronomy professor Marten van Kerkwijk, a member of the research team, according to the study.
The neutron star is a rapidly spinning "pulsar" that acts like a lighthouse, emitting regular flashes of intense radio waves. Made from the crushed inner core of a giant exploding star, it measures just 20 kilometers across but is so dense that a sugar cube-sized lump of its material would weigh more than a billion tones on Earth.
Astronomers said the results exactly matched the predictions of General Relativity, pushing Einstein's theory to new limits. "We thought this system might be extreme enough to show a breakdown in General Relativity, but instead, Einstein's predictions held up quite well," said Dr Paulo Freire, from the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany.
Einstein's general theory of relativity explains gravity as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime created by the presence of mass and energy. As two stars orbit each other, gravitational waves are emitted - wrinkles moving out in spacetime. As a result, the binary slowly loses energy, the stars move closer, and the orbital period shortens.
"The observations disprove these alternatives, and thus give further confidence that Einstein's theory is a good description of nature - even though we know it is not a complete one, given the unresolved inconsistencies with quantum mechanics," van Kerkwijk added.
