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AFP

Albert Einstein is again right: a prediction of his theory of general relativity has been successfully tested in Chile when studying the pbadage of a star close of the supermbadive black hole located in the center "We have verified an important prediction of the theory of general relativity in the environment of a black hole, which is the redshift of light" by the effect d & # 39; An intense gravitational field, he said. AFP Guy Perrin, one of the "fathers" of Gravity instrument who facilitated this result, published Thursday in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A black hole is an object so dense that its gravity prevents it from escaping even to light Cercas deviates the trajectory of light beams

The center of the Milky Way, the galaxy where the Earth is now 26,000 light-years away, home to one of those invisible monsters, Sagittarius A *, which is equivalent to 4 million times that of the sun.

It is surrounded by an agglomeration of stars that, because of their gravity, reach vertiginous speeds when they approach

Squeezing Gravity and two other instruments , the international team of astronomers has been interested in one of these stars, S2, and observed it before and after its pbadage in the nearest point of its orbiting Sagittarius A * on May 19th. [19659004] The gravity interferometer, whose design took more than ten years, combines the light collected by four telescopes of the European VLT (Very Large Telescope) installed in the Atacama desert in Chile. Its resolution is 15 times higher than that of the largest optical telescopes.

"More than 100 years after his article, which posed the equations of general relativity, Einstein shows that he is still right, in a much larger laboratory than what he would have imagined," he said. said the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

A tennis ball on the moon

In operation since 2015, Gravity had already observed the pbadage of the S2 star near the black hole in 2016, "but this time, thanks to two instrumental improvements, we were able to observe the star with unprecedented accuracy, "emphasizes Reinhard Genzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching (Germany), the other father of Gravity. 19659004] The accuracy obtained was 50 microseconds angle, or "is 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 e France [19659004] With this precision, the movement of S2 around Sagittarius A * could be detected almost hour after hour.

When the star pbaded 120 times the Earth-Sun distance from the black hole (less than 20,000 million kilometers), its orbital velocity reached 8,000 kilometers / second, or about 3% of the speed of the light. Conditions quite extreme for the star S2 to suffer significant effects related to general relativity.

"According to this theory, a mbadive body attracts light (bending light rays) or slows down time," says Guy Perrin, astronomer at the Paris-PSL Observatory

"When l & # 39; star approaching the black hole, it appears redder than is actually "because there is a difference in wavelength to red, because of the very strong gravitational pull of the hole black, "he added.

This is the first time that this effect is measured directly in the in regard to the intense gravitational field of a black hole [19659004ESOtheseresultsare"thehighpointofobservationof26years"achievedwiththesetelescopes

The consortium that did the research is conducted by the Max Planck Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics and its activities are mainly conducted by the CNRS, the Paris-PSL Observatory, the University of Grenoble-Alpes, the Astroph Center Central Portugal.