Witnessed Dragging Of Space-Time Confirms Einstein’s General Relativity Theory

Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com – Fans of Albert Einstein can celebrate!  After tracking the orbit of an exotic stellar pair for almost two decades, astronomers have witnessed “frame-dragging” — the dragging of space-time in a stellar cosmic dance.

Witnessed Dragging Of Space-Time Confirms Einstein's General Relativity

Artist’s depiction of a rapidly spinning neutron star and a white dwarf dragging the fabric of space time around its orbit. Credit: Mark Myers, OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence

This study confirms Einstein’s general relativity theory according to which the force of gravity arises from the curvature of space and time and that objects, such as the Sun and the Earth, change this geometry.

With the detection of gravitational waves — ripples in the universal fabric of space-time — produced by two neutron stars merging together, a new era started in astronomy in 2016.

Later the Event Horizon Telescope delivered the first image of a black hole shadow and stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy. Everyone was as astounded as excited. The monster black hole was larger than our entire galaxy.

First Photo Of A Black Hole Released - This Giant Monster Is Larger Than Our Entire Solar System!

The black hole image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

The first image of a black hole provided scientists with profound knowledge about some of the greatest secrets of the Universe.

Almost twenty years ago, a team led by Swinburne University of Technology’s Professor Bailes — director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) — started observing two stars rotating around each other at astonishing speeds with the CSIRO Parkes 64-metre radio telescope.

One is a white dwarf, the size of the Earth but 300,000 times its density; the other is a neutron star which, while only 20 kilometers in diameter, is about 100 billion times the density of the Earth. The system, which was discovered at Parkes, is a relativistic-wonder system that goes by the name ‘PSR J1141-6545’.

Before the star blew up (becoming a neutron star), a million or so years ago, it began to swell up discarding its outer core which fell onto the white dwarf nearby. This falling debris made the white dwarf spin faster and faster, until its day was only measured in terms of minutes.

In 1918 (three years after Einstein published his Theory), Austrian mathematicians Josef Lense and Hans Thirring realized that if Einstein was right all rotating bodies should ‘drag’ the very fabric of space time around with them. In everyday life, the effect is miniscule and almost undetectable.

Earlier this century, the first experimental evidence for this effect was seen in gyroscopes orbiting the Earth, whose orientation was dragged in the direction of the Earth’s spin. A rapidly spinning white dwarf, like the one in PSR J1141-6545, drags space-time 100 million times as strongly!

pulsar in orbit around such a white dwarf presents a unique opportunity to explore Einstein’s theory in a new ultra-relativistic regime.

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Lead author of the current study, Dr. Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan (from Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy — MPIfR) was given the unenviable task of untangling all of the competing relativistic effects at play in the system as part of his Ph.D. at Swinburne University of Technology. He noticed that unless he allowed for a gradual change in the orientation of the plane of the orbit, General Relativity made no sense.

MPIfR’s Dr. Paulo Friere realized that frame-dragging of the entire orbit could explain their tilting orbit and the team presents compelling evidence that General Relativity is alive and well, exhibiting yet another of its many predictions.

“At first, the stellar pair appeared to exhibit many of the classic effects that Einstein’s theory predicted. We then noticed a gradual change in the orientation of the plane of the orbit.’

Pulsars are cosmic clocks. Their high rotational stability means that any deviations to the expected arrival time of its pulses is probably due to the pulsar’s motion or due to the electrons and magnetic fields that the pulses encounter.

Pulsar timing is a powerful technique where we use atomic clocks at radio telescopes to estimate the arrival time of the pulses from the pulsar to very high precision. The motion of the pulsar in its orbit modulates the arrival time, thereby enabling its measurement,” Dr. Krishnan explained.

“In a stellar pair, the first star to collapse is often rapidly rotating due to subsequent mass transfer from its companion. Tauris’s simulations helped quantify the magnitude of the white dwarf’s spin. In this system the entire orbit is being dragged around by the white dwarf’s spin, which is misaligned with the orbit,” Professor Thomas Tauris, Aarhus University said.


“One of the first confirmations of frame-dragging used four gyroscopes in a satellite in orbit around the Earth, but in our system the effects are 100 million times stronger,” Dr. Norbert Wex, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) added.

Despite this amazing discovery, we must caution that some scientists say our current understanding of gravity may be wrong. As previously discussed, researchers have discovered that symmetry is impossible in quantum gravity and this finding opens a new exciting chapter in our science books.

Written by Cynthia McKanzie – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer

Expand for references

Reference: “Lense–Thirring frame dragging induced by a fast-rotating white dwarf in a binary pulsar system” by V. Venkatraman Krishnan, M. Bailes, W. van Straten, N. Wex, P. C. C. Freire, E. F. Keane, T. M. Tauris, P. A. Rosado, N. D. R. Bhat, C. Flynn, A. Jameson and S. Osłowski, 31 January 2020, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aax7007