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An international team, composed of Portuguese physicists, was able to prove, for the first time, the effects predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity on supermassive black holes, after 26 years of observations
One way to test a theory physics is to measure their behavior in extreme cases, "Lusa told the astrophysicist Paulo Garcia of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto ( FEUP)
In this case, in order to test Einstein's general theory of relativity, the supermassive black hole closest to the Earth (26 000 light-years), located at the center of the Milky Way , which has a mass of four million times the solar mass and is surrounded by a small group of stars that orbit it
Using GRAVITY, SINFONI and NACO instruments installed in the VLT telescope of the Southern European Observatory (ESO) in Chile, scientists They observed a star called S2, the known object that passes closer to the central black hole of the Milky Way.
According to Paulo Garcia, the S2 star crossed the nearest point of the black hole on May 19, 2018, a distance less than
Thanks to "very accurate" measurements of position and speed of this star, obtained by the three instruments, it was possible to check an effect called deviation of the
This effect occurs "when the light emitted by the star is stretched in the direction of the longer lengths of "Wave", because of the "very strong gravitational field of the black hole". The wavelength of light recorded in the star "is precisely in agreement with the variation predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity", which explains gravity as a deformation of space-time, contrasting with Newton's laws, which explain this force as acting at a distance, clarified.
This is the first time that "this kind of deviation from Newton's theory of gravity predictions is observed in the movement of a star around a supermassive black hole," says an ESO Information Note on Discovery
We now know that Einstein's theory is true for black holes with masses of millions of solar masses. In the present case, all the tests had been carried out with very small masses, in the order of tens of solar masses (as in the case of the detection of gravitational waves) or of the solar mass, "emphasizes Paulo Garcia
. follows the star S2, "looking for a deviation in its orbit called the Schwarzschild precession."
"It is the second effect of the theory of relativity that we seek," he added
. a "long-sought" result, representing "the culmination of a 26-year observation campaign", it is still read in the ESO statement
More than a hundred years after the publication of his article describing the equations of general relativity, Einstein proved that he was right once again – and in a lab far more extreme than he could ever imagine. "
The Portuguese team involved in this investigation has a physics s of the FEUP and the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, integrated in the research unit CENTRA (Center d & # 39; 39, Astrophysics and Gravitation), in collaboration with French and German scientists
They are responsible for the design, construction and validation of GRAVITY's infrared camera, which combines four giant telescopes, each with an eight-meter mirror in diameter, which work together as a telescope of about 130 meters.
This instrument makes it possible to perform several measurements in real time, so that the instrument points to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way and remains precisely in this position during the observations
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