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In this illustration, a hot, dense and expanding cloud of debris is stripped of neutron stars just before their collision.
Credit: Goddard Space of NASA Flight Center / CI Lab
Gravity is great, strange and hard to study. It moves in space like a wave, much like light does. But these waves are subtle and difficult to detect. They occur in measurable quantities only after mbadive events, such as the collision of black holes. Humankind has not spotted its first gravitational wave before 2015. Then, in 2017, astronomers detected for the first time the gravitational waves and light coming from a single event: a collision. Neutron stars. Researchers are now using the data from this event to confirm some basic facts about the universe.
In a document first uploaded on November 1 on the pre-print server arXiv (which Live Science saw for the first time in ScienceAlert), the researchers announced that they had found no evidence of "gravitational leakage". Scientists had thought that it was possible for gravity to enter the higher dimensions (those beyond the four that humans experience – up / down, side by side, forward / backward, time) even though light do not do it. If this happens, the force of gravity would lose more of its energy than light while crossing the space. But the comparison of the light and gravitational waves resulting from this collision between neutron stars showed that this did not happen.
The gravity of our whole dimension seems to remain as it is, as Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity.
The researchers in the new study also badyzed gravitational waves to determine whether graviton – the theoretical particle that carries gravity – could have a mbad, unlike other particles. If there was a "mbadive graviton", the gravitational waves would also have a mbad, and if these waves had a mbad, they would show signs of momentum, unlike the light particles, which are mbadless. It would also be a violation of general relativity. But, again, this has not been the case.
Overall, the researchers found that Einstein's theories of gravity remain fundamentally intact. One day it could change. But he has not done it yet, even after two neutron stars crashed.
Originally published on Live Science .
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