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Einstein showed Newton was wrong about gravity. Now scientists are coming for
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SCIENCE
Einstein showed Newton was wrong about gravity. Now scientists are coming for
Einstein.
New research confirms Einstein's theory of gravity but brings scientists a step
closer to the day when it might be supplanted by something new.
Image: An artist's rendering of a supermassive black hole
An artist's rendering of a supermassive black hole.NASA/JPL-Caltech
Aug. 3, 2019, 3:42 PM IST
By Jeremy Deaton
Albert Einstein can explain a lot, but maybe not black holes. Scientists believe
that within the inky depths of these massive celestial objects, the laws of the
universe fold in on themselves, and the elegant model of gravity laid out in
Einstein’s general theory of relativity breaks down.

They don't know precisely how or where that happens, but a new study brings them
closer to the answer.

The study, to be published Aug. 16 in the journal Science, shows that gravity works
just as Einstein predicted even at the very edge of a black hole — in this case
Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
But the study is just the opening salvo in a far-ranging effort to find the point
where Einstein’s model falls apart.

Image: Picture of black hole

The first-ever image of a black hole, the dark circle surrounded by a swirling
cloud of hot gas.Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
"We now have the technological capacity to test gravitational theories in ways
we've never been able to before,” study co-author Jessica Lu, an astrophysicist at
the University of California, Berkeley, said. “Einstein's theory of gravity is
definitely in our crosshairs."

That means we may be closer to the day when Einstein’s relativity is supplanted by
some as-yet-undescribed new theory of gravity.

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“Newton had a great time for a long time with his description [of gravity], and
then at some point it was clear that that description was fraying at the edges, and
then Einstein offered a more complete version,” said Andrea Ghez, an astrophysicist
at UCLA and a co-leader of the new research. “And so today, we're at that point
again where we understand there has to be something that is more comprehensive that
allows us to describe gravity in the context of black holes.”

Changing ideas about gravity

In Newton’s view, all objects — from his not-so-apocryphal apple to planets and
stars — exert a force that attracts other objects. That universal law of
gravitation worked pretty well for predicting the motion of planets as well as
objects on Earth — and it's still used, for example, when making the calculations
for a rocket launch.

But Newton's view of gravity didn't work for some things, like Mercury’s peculiar
orbit around the sun. The orbits of planets shift over time, and Mercury’s orbit
shifted faster than Newton predicted.

Einstein offered a different view of gravity, one that made sense of Mercury.
Instead of exerting an attractive force, he reasoned that each object curves the
fabric of space and time around them, forming a sort of well that other objects —
and even beams of light — fall into. Think of the sun as a bowling ball on a
mattress. It creates a depression that draws the planets close.

This new model solved the Mercury problem. It showed that the sun so curves space
that it distorts the orbits of nearby bodies, including Mercury. In Einstein’s
view, Mercury might look like a marble forever circling the bottom of a drain.

Image: Earth warps space, time

Like all massive objects, the Earth warps the fabric of space.NASA's Imagine the
Universe
Einstein’s theory has been confirmed by more than a century of experiments,
starting with one involving a 1919 solar eclipse in which the path of light from
distant stars was shifted by the sun’s intense gravitation — by just the amount
Einstein had predicted.

But Ghez and her colleagues wanted to subject Einstein to a more rigorous test. So
they watched what happened when light from the star S0-2 passed Sagittarius A*,
which is four million times more massive than the sun.

Telltale color change

For the new research, Lu, Ghez and their collaborators used a trio of giant
telescopes in Hawaii to watch as a bluish star named S0-2 made its closest approach
to Sagittarius A* in its 16-year orbit around the black hole.

If Einstein was right, the black hole would warp space and time in a way that
extended the wavelength of light from S0-2. In short, the waves would stretch out
as the intense gravity from the black hole drained their energy, causing the
starlight's color to shift from blue to red. If the star continued to glow blue, it
would give credence to Newton's model of gravity, which doesn't account for the
curvature of space and time. If it turned a different color, it would have hinted
at some other model of gravity altogether.

Just as Einstein would have predicted, the star glowed red.

“You might say, ‘Who cares?’ But in fact, no one has looked there,” Ghez said. “So
we've been able to take a big step forward in terms of exploring a regime that's
not been explored before … You know there's a cliff, and you want to get close to
that cliff, but you don't know where the drop-off is.”

What comes next

Scientists know that at some point in a black hole, Einstein's theory stops
working. “The curvature of spacetime is so extreme that Einstein's general
relativity fails," said Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist at
the California Institute of Technology, who wasn't involved in the new research.
"We don't understand how it works when the thing you're dealing with is extreme.”

This experiment brings scientists a little closer to understanding.

"It's definitely exciting," said Zoltan Haiman, a Columbia University

astrophysicist who wasn't involved in the new research. "It's pushing the envelope.
This is how we get to some place where we discover [Einstein's] theory no longer
works."

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Haimain said he was "in awe" of the work researchers had done, likening tracking
S0-2 from an observatory on Earth to studying a tree in Paris from a balcony in New
York City.

"This test is just the beginning," Lu said. Researchers plan to use a new
generation of high-powered instruments to conduct more tests of gravity around
black holes. For example, they'll keep an eye on SO-2, to see if its orbit proceeds
as Einstein would have expected, or if it takes a different path around Sagittarius
A*, suggesting an alternate model of gravity.

In the next 10 years, Lu said, "we should be able to push Einstein's theory of
gravity to its limits and hopefully start to see cracks."

What would that mean for science?

“It’s very hard to predict how new discoveries in fundamental physics will impact
our day-to-day lives,” Lu said. “But a new theory of gravity might help us
understand how our own universe was born, and how we got to where we are today 13½
billion years later.”

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