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[GK86]

The science and all that good jazz can be found here.

Leave it to the Hubble Space Telescope to prove Albert Einstein wrong. Or at least, unnecessarily pessimistic.

Recently, Hubble spied a dead star about 18 light-years away warping the light of a more distant star that appeared to pass behind it. Einstein predicted this effect would happen based on his general theory of relativity, but he then claimed scientists had “no hope” of actually seeing it.

Of course, he wrote that dour phrase nearly 60 years before humans launched a rather impressive piece of hardware into Earth’s orbit.

The star-crossed effect, called gravitational microlensing, has been observed before using a much closer star—our own sun—as a lens. Most notably, during the total solar eclipse of 1919, Arthur Eddington measured the positions of stars situated near the edge of the darkened sun. He saw that our home star’s gravity was tweaking that distant starlight, demonstrating that Einstein was onto something with his work on relativity.

Astronomers have used similar techniques to detect exoplanets and clumps of otherwise invisible dark matter, which bend light coming from background objects, and they have used entire clusters of galaxies as lenses to watch faraway stars explode over and over again.

But until now, no one had caught one small star in the act of bending light from another. That’s the scenario Einstein laid out in a 1936 paper also published in Science, which he suggested would be near impossible to see.

Turns out, Einstein only published this paper because a buddy suggested he do so: “Some time ago, R. W. Mandl paid me a visit and asked me to publish the results of a little calculation, which I had made at his request,” he wrote. “This note complies with his wish.”

Another article:

A team led by Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, watched the position of a distant star jiggle slightly, as its light bent around a white dwarf in the line of sight of observers on Earth. The amount of distortion allowed the researchers to directly calculate the white dwarf’s mass — 67% that of the Sun.

Sahu’s team studied a white dwarf known as Stein 2051 B, in the constellation Camelopardalis. At 5 parsecs (17 light years) from Earth, it is the sixth-nearest white dwarf.

Because it is so close, it appears to move quickly across the sky compared with more-distant stars. Sahu and his colleagues realized that during 2014 it would pass directly in front of a background star that lies around 1,500 parsecs, or 5,000 light-years, away. They signed up for time on Hubble to watch the event.

In eight observations between October 2013 and October 2015, the background star seemed to shift back and forth slightly. The shift was so small it was equivalent to a person in London watching an ant crawl across a coin in Moscow, but it was enough to confirm that the gravity of Stein 2051 B was bending the light of the background star.

In 1919, British astronomer Arthur Eddington and his team watched light bending around the Sun during a total solar eclipse, confirming Einstein’s theory. Researchers have since seen light from distant galaxies bending around the gravity of intervening galaxies, but the new work is the first time anyone has observed a single object — the white dwarf — seemingly cause a background star to shift.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

Damn, that is cool. I imagine if Einstein were alive he'd be damn excited to be able to actually observe this.

 

[nhlducks35]

Science is so awesome

If you guys have ever seen Interstellar, you can see the lensing effect as an example

 

[madstarr12]

Einstein would be proud and gleeful with joy to see this.

 

[Affeinvasion]

I love how they lead with "this would prove Einstein wrong," when really it proved him right.

 

[lastplayed]

The shift was so small it was equivalent to a person in London watching an ant crawl across a coin in Moscow

lol I love these examples.

 

[Herr Schwarz]

Who is the millennial Einstein these days? Facebook guy? Musk?

 

[Kuro]

Who is the millennial Einstein these days? Facebook guy? Musk?

Some kid still in grade school probably.

 

[Baron Von Beans]

Goddam Einstein has to be an alien. To theorize and predict these things, only having the "primitive" technology compared to today...it's remarkable.

 

[Air]

Who is the millennial Einstein these days? Facebook guy? Musk?

I don't really see anyone having the same contribution to science these days as Einstein did in the past tbh

 

[BasilZero]

Its amazing how Einstein predicted that during his time for it to become reality way after his time.

I cant imagine what he would have discovered or theorized if he had access to today's technology.

 

[UpDownLeftRight]

lol I love these examples.

I like to think there's one lone mad scientist somewhere who's sole job is to come up with these random ass probability analogies. There's always one on hand somehow.

 

[ibyea]

Goddam Einstein has to be an alien. To theorize and predict these things, only having the "primitive" technology compared to today...it's remarkable.

???
Physicists making wild predictions like that and being right about it wasn't anything new at that point.

 

[BeforeU]

Who is the millennial Einstein these days? Facebook guy? Musk?

You gotta be sitting me dude lol just answering your question is an insult to Einstein.

Goddam Einstein has to be an alien. To theorize and predict these things, only having the "primitive" technology compared to today...it's remarkable.

Yup, it is insane how much he got it right 100 of years ago. There are still so many unproven theories which today our brightest minds working everyday to just understand lol

???
Physicists making wild predictions like that and being right about it wasn't anything new at that point.

Are you for real?

 

[MattKeil]

???
Physicists making wild predictions like that and being right about it wasn't anything new at that point.

...what?

 

[ibyea]

Are you for real?

...what?

Yeah. One example, Maxwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves by manipulating a series of equations on electricity and magnetism. These waves can be created by having charges and accelerating them. Furthermore, turns out these waves have the same properties as light, and predicts the exact value of the speed of light at a vacuum. The speed of light prediction by itself was special because it never references any reference frame, which is a huge hint towards the creation of special relativity.

Einstein was a genius, but let's not pretend he was the only one of his kind.

 

[Vincent Alexander]

Yeah. One example, Maxwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves by manipulating a series of equations on electricity and magnetism. These waves can be created by having charges and accelerating them. Furthermore, turns out these waves have the same properties as light, and predicts the exact value of the speed of light at a vacuum. The speed of light prediction by itself was special because it never references any reference frame, which is a huge hint towards the creation of special relativity.

Einstein was a genius, but let's not pretend he was the only one of his kind.

Yeah. Maxwell was remarkable too. And Einstein.

Though Einstein more. It took 23 years after Maxwell's prediction for his predictions to be proven right. It took Einstein what...60-70 years for technology to catch up to him?

 

[PantherLotus]

no, you're wrong, Einstein and Newton before him are the two greatest scientists in human history and established the pillars of everything we know about everything. get out of here with the he-ain't-special trash.

there may never be another einstein because we've advanced far enough to require computers to surpass him. seriously.

 

[ibyea]

no, you're wrong, Einstein and Newton before him are the two greatest scientists in human history and established the pillars of everything we know about everything. get out of here with the he-ain't-special trash.

there may never be another einstein because we've advanced far enough to require computers to surpass him. seriously.

That is such a shallow understanding of physics history.

 

[SRG01]

Yeah. One example, Maxwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves by manipulating a series of equations on electricity and magnetism. These waves can be created by having charges and accelerating them. Furthermore, turns out these waves have the same properties as light, and predicts the exact value of the speed of light at a vacuum. The speed of light prediction by itself was special because it never references any reference frame, which is a huge hint towards the creation of special relativity.

Einstein was a genius, but let's not pretend he was the only one of his kind.

Interesting factoid: it was Oliver Heaviside -- who had no formal education -- that formalized Maxwell's theories and is behind almost everything in Electrical and Electronics Engineering theory.

 

[bachikarn]

no, you're wrong, Einstein and Newton before him are the two greatest scientists in human history and established the pillars of everything we know about everything. get out of here with the he-ain't-special trash.

there may never be another einstein because we've advanced far enough to require computers to surpass him. seriously.

And you are completely under selling all the other amazing scientists between Newton and Einstein. Just because you haven't heard of them, doesn't mean their work isn't comparable in their innovation.

 

[ibyea]

Interesting factoid: it was Oliver Heaviside -- who had no formal education -- that formalized Maxwell's theories and is behind almost everything in Electrical and Electronics Engineering theory.

Yeah, the original equations by Maxwell had 20 equations or some such numbers, which used quaternions instead of vectors, but which does have the antisymmetric property of the vector cross products.

 

[lastplayed]

no, you're wrong, Einstein and Newton before him are the two greatest scientists in human history and established the pillars of everything we know about everything. get out of here with the he-ain't-special trash.

there may never be another einstein because we've advanced far enough to require computers to surpass him. seriously.

Newton stood on the shoulders of giants though.

 

[Sectorseven]

Does this mean there could be stars closer to us than we originally thought?

 

[ibyea]

And you are completely under selling all the other amazing scientists between Newton and Einstein. Just because you haven't heard of them, doesn't mean their work isn't comparable in their innovation.

Or heck, the people before Newton. The Arabs established the foundation of optics. Galileo himself had enough insight to think of the first theory of relativity (Einstein's relativity is basically the second one), which btw, is the subject of Newton's first law, and Galileo pretty much used Einstein style thought experiment to figure out that gravity accelerate objects at the same rate. Without Kepler's contribution in astronomy, Newton wouldn't have had as clear of an understanding of the law of gravity. Mathematics had contributions from geniuses like Archimedes. There are a gazillion examples out there of really smart people figuring stuff out.

 

[RCSI]

And you are completely under selling all the other amazing scientists between Newton and Einstein. Just because you haven't heard of them, doesn't mean their work isn't comparable in their innovation.

And all other scientists after Einstein (With the talk on prior work by scientists and the article, I was reminded of this video on simulating stellar decay).

I've read the numerous articles scientists have performed on objects (galaxies, black holes), but it is stellar to see generally relativity hold up for a white dwarf.