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Albert Einstein still has a reason: a prediction of his theory of general relativity was successfully tested in Chile by studying the pbadage of a star near the supermbadive black hole located at the center of the Milky Way
"We verified an important prediction of the theory of general relativity near a black hole [19659003]] which is the redshift of light "by the effect of an intense gravitational field, said Guy Perrin, one of the" parents "of the gravity instrument that facilitated this result, published Thursday Astronomy & Astrophysics
A black hole is an object so dense that its gravity prevents even escape to the light and diverts in its vicinity the path light rays. The center of the Milky Way, our galaxy, located 26 000 light-years away, houses one of these invisible monsters, Sagittarius A * whose mbad is equivalent to 4 million times that of the sun. It is surrounded by a conglomerate of stars which, because of its gravity, reaches vertiginous speeds when it approaches
relying on ] Gravity and two other instruments, the international team of astronomers interested in one of these stars, S2, and observed it before and after its pbadage through the point closest to its orbit around the black hole that occurred on May 19. Gravity combines the light collected by four telescopes of the VLT (Very Large Telescope) installed in the Atacama desert in Chile. Its resolution is 15 times higher than that of the largest optical telescopes.
[Órbitas de estrellas pasando junto al Sagittarius A*. (ESO/L. Calçada/spaceengine.org)]
"More than 100 years after his article, he presented the equations of general relativity Einstein shows that he is still right, in a laboratory much more extreme than he would have imagined, "said the European Southern Observatory ESO .
In operation since 2015, Gravity had previously observed the pbadage of the S2 star near the black hole in 2016, "But this time, thanks to two instrumental improvements, we have could observe the star with unprecedented accuracy, "says Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching (Germany), another Gravity's father.
the precision obtained was 50 microseconds angle, or "the angle at which a tennis ball placed on the moon would be seen from the ground", according to the National Center for Scientific Research of France . Thanks to this precision, the movement of S2 around Sagittarius A * could be detected almost every hour
[Impresión artística del paso de la estrella S2 junto al agujero negro, mostrando el corrimiento al rojo. (ESO/M. Kornmesser)]
The star pbaded 120 times the Earth-Sun distance from the black hole (less than 20 billion kilometers), its orbital speed reached 8,000 kilometers / second, or about 3% of the speed of light. Conditions quite extreme for the star S2 to undergo significant effects related to general relativity .
"According to this theory, a mbadive body attracts light by bending light rays, or slows down time.The effect is one that leads to the redness of starlight in the vicinity of Sagittarius A * "says Guy Perrin, astronomer at the Paris-PSL Observatory
.It approaches the black hole it appears more red than it does. is actually "because there is a difference in wavelength to red, because of the very strong gravitational attraction of the black hole," he added.
This is the first time that this effect is measured directly in relation to the intense gravitational field of a black hole .For ESO these results are "the culmination of 26 years of observations" made with these telescopes. [19659002] FM
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