by Legendary physicist Albert Einstein was a thinker ahead of his time. Born on March 14, 1879, Einstein entered a world where the dwarf planet Pluto had yet to be discovered and the idea of ​​space travel was a distant dream. Despite the technical limitations of his time, Einstein published his famous Theory of the General relativity in 1915, making predictions about the nature of the universe that would prove correct again and again for the next 100+ years.
Here are 10 recent observations that proved Einstein right about the nature of the cosmos a century ago—and one that proved him wrong.
1. The first image of a black hole
Einstein’s general theory of relativity describes heaviness as a result of warping of Leisure time; Basically, the more massive an object is, the more it warps spacetime, causing smaller objects to fall onto it. The theory also predicts the existence of black holes – massive objects that warp space-time so badly that not even light can escape them.
When researchers captured the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). very first image of a black holethey proved that Einstein was right about some very specific things – namely, that every black hole has a point of no return called the event horizon, which should be roughly circular and a predictable size based on the mass of the black hole. The groundbreaking image of the EHT black hole showed that this prediction was spot on.
2. “Echoes” from black holes
Astronomers once again proved Einstein’s black hole theories correct when they discovered 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 emissions flashing from the face of the black hole, the team also spotted the predicted ones “luminous echoes” of X-ray lightemitted behind the black hole but are still visible from Earth because the black hole has bent space-time around it.
3. Gravitational waves
Einstein’s theory of relativity also describes enormous ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves. These waves result from mergers between the most massive objects in the universe, such as black holes and neutron stars. With a special detector called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Physicists confirmed the existence of gravitational waves in 2015and have continued to recognize Dozens of other examples of gravitational waves in the years since, which once again proved Einstein right.
4. Wobbly Black Hole Partners
Studying gravitational waves can reveal the mysteries of the massive, distant objects that released them. By examining the gravitational waves emitted by a Pair of slowly colliding binary black holes In 2022, physicists confirmed that the massive objects wobbled—or precessed—in their orbits as they whirled closer and closer together, just as Einstein had predicted.
5. A “dancing” spirograph star
Scientists once again saw Einstein’s theory of precession in action after studying a star orbiting a supermassive black hole for 27 years. After completing two full orbits of the black hole, the The star’s orbit was seen to “dance”. forward in a rosette pattern rather than moving in a fixed elliptical orbit. This movement confirmed Einstein’s predictions of how an extremely small object should orbit a comparatively huge one.
6. A frame pulling neutron star
It’s not just black holes that warp space-time around them; so can the ultradense shells of dead stars. In 2020, physicists studied how a neutron star orbited a white dwarf (two types of collapsed, dead stars) over the past 20 years and found a long-term drift in the way the two objects orbited mutual. According to the researchers, this drift was likely caused by an effect called frame dragging; Essentially, the white dwarf had tugged at spacetime enough to cause the neutron star’s orbit to change slightly over time. This in turn confirms predictions from Einstein’s theory of relativity.
7. A Gravity Magnifier
According to Einstein, if an object is sufficiently massive, it should warp spacetime in such a way that distant light emitted from behind the object appears magnified (as seen from Earth). This effect is called gravitational lensing and has been used extensively to hold a magnifying glass on objects in the deep Universe. Known the The first deep field image from the James Webb Space Telescope used the gravitational lensing effect of a galaxy cluster 4.6 billion light-years away to significantly magnify the light from galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away.
8. Put an Einstein ring on it
One form of gravitational lensing is so vivid that physicists couldn’t help but put Einstein’s name on it. When the light is magnified from a distant object to a perfect halo around a massive foreground object, Scientists call it an “Einstein Ring”. These stunning objects exist throughout space and have been imaged by astronomers and citizen scientists alike.
9. The changing universe
As light moves through the universe, its wavelength shifts and stretches in a variety of ways known as redshift. The most well-known type of redshift is due to the expansion of the universe. (Einstein hit 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” that occurs when light loses energy on its way out of a depression in spacetime created by massive objects like galaxies. This was proven by a 2011 study of the light from hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies Gravitational redshift really does existas Einstein suggested.
10. Atoms in motion
Einstein’s theories apparently also apply to the quantum domain. The theory of relativity suggests that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, which means space should look the same from all directions. In 2015, researchers proved this effect true even on 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 no matter which direction they were moving, confirming this part of Einstein’s theory.
11. Wrong for “creepy action at a distance”?
In a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, connected particles can seemingly communicate with each other over great distances faster than the speed of light, only “choosing” a state to inhabit when they are measured. Einstein hated this phenomenon, famously deriding it as “spooky action at a distance” and insisting that no influence can travel faster than light and that objects have a state whether we measure them or not.
But in one massive, global experiment measuring millions of entangled particles around the world, the researchers found that the particles appeared to assume a state only at the moment they were measured, and no earlier.
“We have shown that Einstein’s worldview … in which things have properties whether you observe them or not, and no influence travels faster than light, cannot be true – at least one of those things has to be wrong,” co-author of the study Morgan MitchellProfessor of Quantum Optics at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain, told Live Science in 2018.
