Einstein wins again
There's no getting past Einstein and his General Theory of Relativity.
Two new studies used observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to test Einstein's theory - and, after 95 years, the famous patent clerk came through with flying colours.
Which is just as well. If it didn't, you'd find many a panicked physicist perched on window ledges all over the world.
Each team of scientists took advantage of observations of galaxy clusters, which are cosmic formations that can contain anywhere from ten to thousands of galaxies and are the largest objects in the universe bound together by gravity.
Because the observations of the masses of galaxy clusters are directly sensitive to the properties of gravity, they can provide crucial information.
The results of one study undercut a rival gravity model that challenged General Relativity, while the other showed that Einstein's theory is applicable over a vast range of times and distances across the cosmos.
One team of researchers found gravity on scales larger than 130 million light-years is no different from Einstein's geometric theory of gravitation - putting an end to a clutch of new theories explaining the expansion of the universe that challenged Einstein's ideas.
The findings of the other, separate study bolstered Einstein's theory by directly testing it across cosmological distances and times.
Until now, General Relativity had only been verified using experiments from laboratory to solar system scales, leaving some to believe that the principles of General Relativity could break down when applied to much larger scales.
Well, you can stop that crazy talk now. Relativity won this bout against the doubters as well.
For more information on Einstein and his work, click here.
Weird Science Factoid: The shallowest sea is the Sea of Azov. It is 13 meters at its deepest. Pretty much just a big swimming pool...
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
