MPIfR: Confirming Einstein's Most Fortunate Thought

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MPIfR: Confirming Einstein's Most Fortunate Thought

Post by bystander » Thu Jun 11, 2020 4:07 pm

Confirming Einstein's Most Fortunate Thought
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy | 2020 Jun 10

Radio Astronomers use a Dance of Three Exotic Stars to Test the Universality of Free Fall

An international research team including astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn determined with extremely high precision that gravity causes neutron stars and white dwarf stars to fall with equal accelerations. They did this by precisely tracking the motion of pulsar PSR J0337+1715, a neutron star that is a member of an unusual triple star system. Their findings – achieved by a new rigorous method and a combination of radio telescope data with latest insight from gravitational wave detectors – provide the strongest test ever of one of the most fundamental predictions of general relativity: that gravity attracts all objects with the same acceleration, without regard for their composition, density or the strength of their own gravitational field.

Einstein himself called this insight his “most fortunate thought” since it let him eventually to the theory of general relativity. This is true even for neutron stars, who curve spacetime many trillion times more strongly than planets or even the Sun. Perhaps more than any previous test, this result indicates that general relativity, based on the simplicity of Einstein’s most fortunate thought, really captures something fundamental about Nature.
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An Improved Test of the Strong Equivalence Principle with the Pulsar in a Triple Star System ~ Guillaume Voisin et al
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