Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is being tested by Wayward Satellites

Einstein's Theory Of Relativity is being tested by Wayward Satellites

In August 2014, a rocket launches the fifth and sixth satellite of the Galileo Global Navigation System, which is in the U.S. The answer for the GPS was $ 11 billion. But the celebration rose to despair when it became clear that the satellites were dropped on the wrong cosmic "bus stops". Rather than being placed in spherical orbits at a constant elevation, they were trapped in elliptical orbital for navigation.

However, this accident provided a rare opportunity for a fundamental physics experiment. Two independent research teams- one headed by Pacome Delva of the Paris Observatory in France, the second by Swain Hermann of Bremen University in Germany - monitored satellites to see the hole in the theory of relativity of Einstein's general theory.

"The most accurate description of general relativity gravitation continues, and so far it has left behind a large number of experimental and observational tests," said Eric Poyson, who is a physicist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, who is not included in the new Were research Nevertheless, physicists have not been able to merge general relativity with the laws of quantum mechanics, which explain the behavior of energy and matter at very small levels. "It is one of the reasons to doubt that gravity is not what Einstein gave us," says Poisson. "This is probably a good approximation, but there is more to story."

Einstein's theory predicts that time will move slowly closer to a huge object, which means that on the surface of the Earth, one should be ticking at a more sluggish rate relative to a satellite in the orbit of the clock. The dispersion of this time is known as gravitational redshift. Any subtle deviation from this pattern can give physicists a clue to a new theory that unites gravity and quantum physics.

After reaching Galileo's satellites close to circular orbits, they were climbing and falling 8,500 kilometers twice a day. During three years, teams of Delva and Herman saw how the resulting changes in gravity change the frequency of supercurrent atomic clocks of satellites. In the previous gravitational redevelopment test conducted in 1976, when the gravitational investigation-a suborbital rocket was launched in space with an atomic clock, researchers observed that the general relativity clock frequency change with the uncertainty of 1.4 × 10-4 Was predicted.

New studies published in Physical Review Letters in December last year re-examined Einstein's prediction- and increased the accuracy by a factor of 5.6. Therefore, for now, centuries-old principles still rule.