Legendary physicist Albert Einstein was a thinker ahead of his time. Born on March 14, 1879, Einstein learned about the dwarf planet Pluto, which is still visible to the most modern telescopes today. He had an idea of space flight that became 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 that were made more than a century ago.
A myriad of swirling galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope's first deep-field image and a portrait of Albert Einstein.
Here are observations that prove Einstein was right about the nature of the universe and one that proves he was wrong.
1. The first image of a black hole
Einstein's theory of relativity describes gravity as a result of the warping of spacetime. Essentially, the more massive an object is, the more it warps spacetime, causing smaller objects to fall toward it. The theory also predicts the existence of black holes—massive objects that warp spacetime so much that not even light can escape them.
When researchers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first image of a black hole, they proved that Einstein was right about some very specific things—namely, that every black hole has a point of no return called an event horizon, which is roughly circular and has a predicted size based on the mass of the black hole. The EHT's groundbreaking black hole image shows that this prediction was absolutely correct.
2. The Black Hole Echoes
Astronomers have proven Einstein's theories about black holes correct once again when they detected a strange pattern of X-rays being emitted near a black hole 800 million light-years from Earth. In addition to the expected X-ray emission coming from in front of the black hole, the team also detected a "luminous 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 space-time called gravitational waves. These waves are the result of the merger of 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 more examples of gravitational waves in the following years, once again proving Einstein right.
4. The black hole partners wobble
Studying gravitational waves could reveal the secrets of the massive, distant objects that set them free. By studying gravitational waves emitted by a pair of slowly colliding black holes in 2022, physicists have confirmed that the massive objects oscillate—or precess—in their orbits as they spiral closer and closer together, just as Einstein predicted.
5. The 'dancing' spiral star
Scientists have seen Einstein's theory of precession in action again after studying a star that orbited a supermassive black hole for 27 years. After completing two full orbits of the black hole, the star's orbit was seen to "dance" forward in an asterisk shape rather than moving in a fixed elliptical path.
This motion confirmed Einstein's predictions about how a tiny object would orbit a relatively giant object.
6. Collapsing neutron star
It’s not just black holes that warp the space-time around them; the super-dense shells of dead stars can do the same. In 2020, physicists studied how a neutron star orbited a white dwarf (a type of dying, collapsing star) over the previous 20 years, finding a long-term drift as the two orbited each other.
According to the researchers, this drift could be caused by an effect called tug-of-war. Essentially, the white dwarf tugged on space-time enough to slightly alter the neutron star's orbit over time. This, once again, confirms predictions from Einstein's theory of relativity.
7. Gravitational lens
According to Einstein, if an object is massive enough, it will warp space-time in such a way that distant light 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 to objects in deep space.
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 dramatically magnify light from galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away.
8. Einstein's Halo
Einstein's halo.
One form of gravitational lensing is so vivid that physicists have named it Einstein's. When the light from a distant object is magnified into a perfect halo around a massive object in the foreground, scientists call it an "Einstein halo." These beautiful objects exist throughout space and have been photographed by astronomers.
9. The Universe Shifts
As light travels through the universe, its wavelength changes and stretches in various ways, known as redshifts. The most famous 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 his other equations.)
However, Einstein also predicted a type of “gravitational redshift,” which occurs when light loses energy on its way out of depressions in spacetime created by massive objects, such as galaxies. In 2011, a study of light from hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies proved that “gravitational redshift” does indeed exist, as Einstein proposed.
10. Atoms are moving in quantum entanglement
It seems that Einstein's theories hold true in the quantum realm as well. Relativity states that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum, meaning that space should look the same from every direction.
In 2015, researchers showed that this effect is true even at the smallest scales, when they measured the energy of two electrons moving in different directions around an atom's nucleus. The energy difference between the electrons remained constant, no matter which direction they were moving, confirming that part of Einstein's theory.
11. Wrong about quantum entanglement
In a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, linked particles can seemingly communicate with each other across vast distances faster than the speed of light, only "choosing" a state to reside in after they have been measured.
Einstein hated this phenomenon, deriding it as "spooky action at a distance" and insisting that no influence can travel faster than light and that objects have states 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 appeared to choose just one state as soon as they were measured.
(Source: tienphong.vn)
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