The legendary physicist Albert Einstein was a thinker ahead of his time. Born on March 14, 1879, Einstein was aware of the dwarf planet Pluto, which even today the most advanced telescopes have observed. He conceived the idea of space travel, an idea that would become a reality more than 100 years later.
Despite the technical limitations of the time, Einstein published his famous theory of relativity in 1915, making predictions about the nature of the universe more than a century ago.
Images of countless swirling galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope's first deep-field images and a portrait of Albert Einstein.
Below are observations that prove Einstein was right about the nature of the universe and one that proves him wrong.
1. The first image of a black hole
Einstein's theory of relativity describes gravity as a consequence of the warping of spacetime. Essentially, the heavier an object is, the more it warps spacetime, causing smaller objects to fall toward it. This theory also predicts the existence of black holes—massive objects that warp spacetime to such an extent that even light cannot escape from them.
When researchers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first image of a black hole, they proved Einstein was right about a number of very specific things – namely, that every black hole has an irreversible point called the event horizon, which must be nearly circular and whose size is predicted based on the black hole's mass. The EHT's groundbreaking image of the black hole showed that this prediction was entirely accurate.
2. Black Hole Echoes
Astronomers have once again proven Einstein's theories about black holes correct by detecting a strange form of X-ray emission near a black hole 800 million light-years from Earth. In addition to the expected X-ray emission emanating from the black hole's front, the research team also detected a "glowing echo" of the predicted X-ray light.
3. Gravitational waves
Two black holes merged together.
Einstein's theory of relativity also describes giant ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves. These waves are the result of mergers between the most massive objects in the universe, such as black holes and neutron stars.
Using a special detector called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), physicists confirmed the existence of gravitational waves in 2015 and went on to detect dozens of other examples of gravitational waves in the following years, once again proving Einstein right.
4. Black hole partners wobble.
Studying gravitational waves could reveal the secrets of the massive, distant objects that release them. By studying gravitational waves emitted from a pair of black holes slowly colliding in 2022, physicists confirmed that massive objects oscillate—or precession—in their orbits as they spin closer together, just as Einstein predicted.
5. The 'dancing' spiral star
Scientists have witnessed Einstein's theory of precession at work once again after studying a star orbiting a supermassive black hole for 27 years. After completing two full orbits around the black hole, the star's orbit is thought to "dance" forward in a rosette pattern instead of moving in a fixed elliptical orbit.
This motion confirmed Einstein's predictions about how a tiny object would orbit a relatively massive object.
6. A contracting neutron star
It's not just black holes that bend spacetime around them; the super-dense shells of dead stars can do it too. In 2020, physicists studied how a neutron star orbited a white dwarf (two types of decaying, dead stars) over the previous 20 years, finding long-term drift in which the two objects orbit each other.
According to the researchers, this drift may be caused by an effect called traction. Essentially, the white dwarf pulled spacetime enough to slightly alter the neutron star's orbit over time. This, again, confirms predictions from Einstein's theory of relativity.
7. Gravitational lens
According to Einstein, if an object is large enough, it will bend spacetime in such a way that light from afar, emitted from behind the object, will be magnified (as seen from Earth). This effect is called gravitational lensing, and has been widely used to hold a magnifying glass for observing objects in the deep universe.
The James Webb Space Telescope's first deep-field image used the gravitational lensing effect of a galaxy cluster 4.6 billion light-years away to significantly magnify light from galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away.
8. Einstein's halo
Einstein's halo.
One type of gravitational lens is so vivid that physicists have named it Einstein. When light from a distant object is magnified into a perfect halo around a massive object in front, scientists call it an "Einstein halo." These stunning objects exist throughout space and have been photographed by astronomers.
9. The universe is shifting.
As light travels through the universe, its wavelength changes and is stretched in various ways, known as redshift. The most well-known type of redshift is due to the expansion of the universe. (Einstein proposed a number called the cosmological constant to account for this apparent expansion in other of his equations.)
However, Einstein also predicted a kind of "gravitational redshift," which occurs when light loses energy on its way out of a depression in spacetime created by massive objects, such as galaxies. In 2011, a study of light from hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies demonstrated that "gravitational redshift" does indeed exist, as Einstein had suggested.
10. Atoms are undergoing quantum entanglement.
It seems that Einstein's theories also hold true in the quantum realm. The theory of relativity states that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum, meaning that space would appear the same from every direction.
In 2015, researchers demonstrated that this effect holds true even at the smallest scale, when they measured the energy of two electrons moving in different directions around an atomic nucleus. The energy difference between the electrons remained constant, regardless of which direction they moved, confirming that part of Einstein's theory.
11. Incorrect regarding the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.
In a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, linked particles appear to be able to communicate with each other over vast distances faster than the speed of light and only "choose" a state to reside in after they are measured.
Einstein hated this phenomenon, ridiculing it as "ghostly effects at long distances" and emphasizing that no influence can travel faster than light and that objects have states of being whether we measure them or not.
However, in a global experiment in which millions of particles were measured around the world , researchers found that particles appear to choose a state at the moment they are measured.
(Source: tienphong.vn)
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