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One of the things predicted by the theory of relativity is "the universality of free fall" – fundamentally, any two objects in a vacuum will fall at the same rate. Whether or not this applies to massive objects such as planets and stars has long been debated, but astronomers have now used the Arecibo Observatory to show that the phenomenon is true, which means that it is not the same. Einstein was right.
will fall to the ground at a constant speed of 9.8 m / s 2 . In practice, of course, this sounds ridiculous – if you drop a bowling ball and a feather from a building, the bowling ball will make a way to the ground while the feather will float around and take a trip a lot quieter. This difference is due to external factors such as resistance to wind and air, and the rule becomes much clearer when you carry these objects in a vacuum chamber – or the moon
. with extreme gravity, with other theories of gravity having been advanced for these much larger scales. To find out, a team of researchers used the Arecibo radio-radar telescope in Puerto Rico
The "natural laboratory" on which they were focusing was a three-star system known as PSR J0337 + 1715. About 4,200 light-years from Earth, this system is composed of a neutron star that revolves around a white dwarf once every 1.6 days, while these two orbit another white dwarf star every 327 days.
reads for the theory of relativity. If Einstein's ideas apply to massive objects, the binary white dwarf stars / neutrons should fall to the other white dwarf at the same rate. The team used Arecibo to focus on the neutron star, and then analyzed the data to study the system as a whole.
"We were able to measure that by looking at the only neutron star," says Anne Archibald, study. "The neutron star, a pulsar of the millisecond, behaves like a clock: it rotates 366 times per second, and the radio wave beams rotate along the Earth at regular intervals, like a lighthouse cosmic tracking the position of the neutron star The high quality data we obtained from Arecibo allowed us to divide the data into subsections and compare them to each other, which allowed us to to resolve an apparent conflict with the gravity of Einstein. "
the team found that the two objects fall at the same rate," differ by fractionally not more than 2.6 × 10 -6 . "
" Thanks to the power of Arecibo and in collaboration with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, we were able to show that the theory of Einstein's relativity retains water, even with respect to the neutron stars and dwarf stars.
The research was published in the journal Nature .
Source: University of Central Florida
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