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Acustik Noticias
Mexico. July 29, 2018.- Einstein's Theory of General Relativity has been validated by a team of astronomers who are following in detail a group of stars at the center of our Milky Way, whose movements are governed by the intense gravity of the supermassive black hole which is also located at the center of our galaxy
The experts closely followed the position and speed of one of them, the S2, and observed a gravitational flush that coincides with the predictions made by said theory. "It's good that we can check in weak gravitational fields like the Earth, and in very intense gravitational fields, like the center of the galaxy, that the physics we know is valid in these cases and that the The evolution of objects is well described by the theory of general relativity, "said José Franco, a researcher at the UNAM Institute of Astronomy .
This corroborates this science It advances with solid foundations, so it's the best way to understand the origin, the evolution and, probably, the end of the Universe, says -he.
The international team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for the Physical Extraterrestrial of Garching, Germany, and European Southern Observatory (ESO), monitor in particular the movement of the star S2, which is the one that passes closest to the center and that was at the time of one of the measures to 20 million kilometers from the black hole, traveling at a speed of 25 million kilometers per hour (almost three percent of the speed of light).
The star orbits around the hole every 16 years and has been followed along 25 years by the experts, who with the help of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its instrumentation have obtained the observations the more accurate movement of an object in the galactic center.
With this work, Franco continued, in addition to verifying Theory of General Relativity shows the power of the technology developed in recent years by astronomers, because they have followed objects orbits meticulously, something which is not easy because the center of our galaxy is far and strongly obscured by Big clouds of gas and dust
The supermassive black hole in question, the closest to the Earth, is at 26,000 light-years and has a mass four million times greater than that of the Sun. surrounded, in addition to dark clouds, by a small group of stars orbiting around them at high speed.
Proven Theory
The theory of general relativity, published in 1915, describes how bodies behave in gravitational fields of all kinds, small or large. Their predictions include the deviation of light in the presence of masses and the change of the rhythm of time due to gravitational fields.
The latter is also equivalent to a variation in the frequency of light when the gravitational potential changes. In other words, the frequency of the atomic clock will change if it is placed in a different gravitational field.
"One of the first proofs that Einstein's theory was correct was the deviation of light by the gravitational field of the Sun, observed in the total solar eclipse of 1919," recalls Franco.
The theory explains that if we understand gravitation as a deformation of space-time, then any object, massive or not, that passes near a mass, will suffer from a deviation. In addition, changing the rhythm of clocks implies that the light that comes out of a gravitational field becomes red, added the head of the Science and Technology Advisory Forum
In the case of the S2 star, "there is a gravitational redness that occurs precisely because of the presence of such an intense field (black hole), and that is what the researchers observed and which confirms the relativistic effect in the presence of strong gravitational fields ", . The deviation of the light and its redness are two different effects, he added. The deviation has been verified since the eclipse of 1919, and in recent years, in regions of the Universe where there are significant mass concentrations that generate the so-called gravitational lenses or light deviations that modify the Image of the objects that are
The gravitational redness, on the other hand, has been verified on Earth, with what is called the Mössbauer effect, which allows to measure the redshift from a beam of light emitted upward, in the direction of the gravitational field. Also with the GPS system, which requires adjustments due to the gravitational shift to maintain accuracy in the monitoring system.
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