- Einstein’s Theory in Action: Supernova Explosion Revealed by Rare “Cosmic Magnifying Glasses” SciTechDaily
- Astronomers capture rare “bizarre” star explosion that could help uncover “the mysteries of the universe” CBS News
- A tiny galaxy brightening up a distant supernova Nature.com
- Seeing quadruple: Rare gravitational lensing warps light from explosion of distant dying star : Big Island Now Big Island Now
- ‘Cosmic magnifying glass’ reveals super-rare warped supernova with gravitational lens. (Thanks, Einstein!) Space.com
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Einsteins
Scientists Finally Manipulate Quantum Light, Fulfilling Einstein’s 107-Year-Old Dream – Yahoo Life
- Scientists Finally Manipulate Quantum Light, Fulfilling Einstein’s 107-Year-Old Dream Yahoo Life
- Physicists Have Manipulated ‘Quantum Light’ For The First Time, in a Huge Breakthrough ScienceAlert
- Quantum light manipulation breakthrough could lead to advances in computing and metrology Interesting Engineering
- Department of Energy Scientists Achieve the Impossible with Major Breakthrough in Ultrafast Beam-Steering The Debrief
- “Quantum light” manipulation a step closer, with potential in medical imaging and quantum computing Cosmos
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Completing Einstein’s Theories – A Particle Physics Breakthrough
More than a century after it was first theorized, scientists have completed Einstein’s homework on special relativity in electromagnetism.
Osaka University researchers show the relativistic contraction of an electric field produced by fast-moving charged particles, as predicted by Einstein’s theory, which can help improve radiation and particle physics research.
Over a century ago, one of the most renowned modern physicists, Albert Einstein, proposed the ground-breaking theory of special relativity. Most of everything we know about the universe is based on this theory, however, a portion of it has not been experimentally demonstrated until now. Scientists from Osaka University’s Institute of Laser Engineering utilized ultrafast electro-optic measurements for the first time to visualize the contraction of the electric field surrounding an electron beam traveling at near the speed of light and demonstrate the generation process.
According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, one must use a “Lorentz transformation” that combines space and time coordinates in order to accurately describe the motion of objects passing an observer at speeds near the speed of light. He was able to explain how these transformations resulted in self-consistent equations for electric and magnetic fields.
While different effects of relativity have been proved numerous times to a very high degree of experimental 
Illustration of the formation process of the planar electric field contraction that accompanies the propagation of a near-light-speed electron beam (shown as an ellipse in the figure). Credit: Masato Ota, Makoto Nakajima
Now, the research team at Osaka University has demonstrated this effect experimentally for the first time. They accomplished this feat by measuring the profile of the Coulomb field in space and time around a high-energy electron beam generated by a linear particle accelerator. Using ultrafast electro-optic sampling, they were able to record the electric field with extremely high temporal resolution.
It has been reported that the Lorentz transformations of time and space as well as those of energy and momentum were demonstrated by time dilation experiments and rest mass energy experiments, respectively. Here, the team looked at a similar relativistic effect called electric-field contraction, which corresponds to the Lorentz transformation of electromagnetic potentials.
“We visualized the contraction of an electric field around an electron beam propagating close to the speed of light,” says Professor Makoto Nakajima, the project leader. In addition, the team observed the process of electric-field contraction right after the electron beam passed through a metal boundary.
When developing the theory of relativity, it is said that Einstein used thought experiments to imagine what it would be like to ride on a wave of light. “There is something poetic about demonstrating the relativistic effect of electric fields more than 100 years after Einstein predicted it,” says Professor Nakajima. “Electric fields were a crucial element in the formation of the theory of relativity in the first place.”
This research, with observations matching closely to Einstein’s predictions of special relativity in electromagnetism, can serve as a platform for measurements of energetic particle beams and other experiments in high-energy physics.
Reference: “Ultrafast visualization of an electric field under the Lorentz transformation” by Masato Ota, Koichi Kan, Soichiro Komada, Youwei Wang, Verdad C. Agulto, Valynn Katrine Mag-usara, Yasunobu Arikawa, Makoto R. Asakawa, Youichi Sakawa, Tatsunosuke Matsui and Makoto Nakajima, 20 October 2022,
Scientists Tested Einstein’s Relativity on a Cosmic Scale, And Found Something Odd : ScienceAlert
Everything in the Universe has gravity – and feels it too. Yet this most common of all fundamental forces is also the one that presents the biggest challenges to physicists.
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been remarkably successful in describing the gravity of stars and planets, but it doesn’t seem to apply perfectly on all scales.
General relativity has passed many years of observational tests, from Eddington’s measurement of the deflection of starlight by the Sun in 1919 to the recent detection of gravitational waves.
However, gaps in our understanding start to appear when we try to apply it to extremely small distances, where the laws of quantum mechanics operate, or when we try to describe the entire universe.
Our new study, published in Nature Astronomy, has now tested Einstein’s theory on the largest of scales.
We believe our approach may one day help resolve some of the biggest mysteries in cosmology, and the results hint that the theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked on this scale.
Faulty model?
Quantum theory predicts that empty space, the vacuum, is packed with energy. We do not notice its presence because our devices can only measure changes in energy rather than its total amount.
However, according to Einstein, the vacuum energy has a repulsive gravity – it pushes the empty space apart. Interestingly, in 1998, it was discovered that the expansion of the Universe is in fact accelerating (a finding awarded with the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics).
However, the amount of vacuum energy, or dark energy as it has been called, necessary to explain the acceleration is many orders of magnitude smaller than what quantum theory predicts.
Hence the big question, dubbed “the old cosmological constant problem”, is whether the vacuum energy actually gravitates – exerting a gravitational force and changing the expansion of the universe.
If yes, then why is its gravity so much weaker than predicted? If the vacuum does not gravitate at all, what is causing the cosmic acceleration?
We don’t know what dark energy is, but we need to assume it exists in order to explain the Universe’s expansion.
Similarly, we also need to assume there is a type of invisible matter presence, dubbed dark matter, to explain how galaxies and clusters evolved to be the way we observe them today.
These assumptions are baked into scientists’ standard cosmological theory, called the lambda cold dark matter (LCDM) model – suggesting there is 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent dark matter, and 5 percent ordinary matter in the cosmos. And this model has been remarkably successful in fitting all the data collected by cosmologists over the past 20 years.
But the fact that most of the Universe is made up of dark forces and substances, taking odd values that don’t make sense, has prompted many physicists to wonder if Einstein’s theory of gravity needs modification to describe the entire universe.
A new twist appeared a few years ago when it became apparent that different ways of measuring the rate of cosmic expansion, dubbed the Hubble constant, give different answers – a problem known as the Hubble tension.
The disagreement, or tension, is between two values of the Hubble constant.
One is the number predicted by the LCDM cosmological model, which has been developed to match the light left over from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background radiation).
The other is the expansion rate measured by observing exploding stars known as supernovas in distant galaxies.
Many theoretical ideas have been proposed for ways of modifying LCDM to explain the Hubble tension. Among them are alternative gravity theories.
Digging for answers
We can design tests to check if the universe obeys the rules of Einstein’s theory.
General relativity describes gravity as the curving or warping of space and time, bending the pathways along which light and matter travel. Importantly, it predicts that the trajectories of light rays and matter should be bent by gravity in the same way.
Together with a team of cosmologists, we put the basic laws of general relativity to test. We also explored whether modifying Einstein’s theory could help resolve some of the open problems of cosmology, such as the Hubble tension.
To find out whether general relativity is correct on large scales, we set out, for the first time, to simultaneously investigate three aspects of it. These were the expansion of the Universe, the effects of gravity on light, and the effects of gravity on matter.
Using a statistical method known as the Bayesian inference, we reconstructed the gravity of the Universe through cosmic history in a computer model based on these three parameters.
We could estimate the parameters using the cosmic microwave background data from the Planck satellite, supernova catalogs as well as observations of the shapes and distribution of distant galaxies by the SDSS and DES telescopes.
We then compared our reconstruction to the prediction of the LCDM model (essentially Einstein’s model).
We found interesting hints of a possible mismatch with Einstein’s prediction, albeit with rather low statistical significance.
This means that there is nevertheless a possibility that gravity works differently on large scales, and that the theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked.
Our study also found that it is very difficult to solve the Hubble tension problem by only changing the theory of gravity.
The full solution would probably require a new ingredient in the cosmological model, present before the time when protons and electrons first combined to form hydrogen just after the Big Bang, such as a special form of dark matter, an early type of dark energy, or primordial magnetic fields.
Or, perhaps, there’s a yet unknown systematic error in the data.
That said, our study has demonstrated that it is possible to test the validity of general relativity over cosmological distances using observational data. While we haven’t yet solved the Hubble problem, we will have a lot more data from new probes in a few years.
This means that we will be able to use these statistical methods to continue tweaking general relativity, exploring the limits of modifications, to pave the way to resolving some of the open challenges in cosmology.
Kazuya Koyama, Professor of Cosmology, University of Portsmouth and Levon Pogosian, Professor of Physics, Simon Fraser University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Einstein’s Mind-Bending Theory of Relativity Passes Yet Another Huge Test
What’s happening
Scientists sent a satellite to space to test Einstein’s weak-equivalence principle with extreme precision.
Why it matters
The weak-equivalence principle is integral to general relativity, so these test results offer yet more support for a core theory of our universe.
In 1916, Albert Einstein dared to declare that Isaac Newton was wrong about gravity. No, he said, it’s not a mysterious force emanating from Earth.
Instead, Einstein imagined that space and time are twisted in an interdimensional grid, and the laces of this grid are like unwound paper clips. Bendable; moldable. It’s only because we exist inside this sort of intangible mesh, he believed, that our simple human bodies experience the facade of a force holding us to the ground. We call that gravity.
(If that hurt your brain, don’t worry, here’s an article dedicated to breaking down this concept.)
And while the genius mathematician referred to this perplexing notion as his theory of general relativity, a title that stuck, his peers called it “totally impractical and absurd,” a title that didn’t. Against all odds, Einstein’s mind-numbing idea has yet to falter. Its premises remain true on both the smallest of scales and the incomprehensibly large. Experts have attempted to poke holes in them again, and again and again, but general relativity always prevails.
And on Wednesday, thanks to an ambitious satellite experiment, scientists announced that, yet again, general relativity has proven itself to be a fundamental truth of our universe. The team conducted what it calls the “most precise test” of one of general relativity’s key aspects, named the weak-equivalence principle, with a mission dubbed Microscope.
“I have been working on this subject for more than 20 years, and I realize the luck I had to be the project manager of the science instrument and the co-investigator of this mission,” said Manuel Rodrigues, a scientist at French aerospace lab ONERA and author of a new study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“This is very rare to leave such a remarkable result in physics history.”
A depiction of how Einstein’s relativity imagines the universe.
Zooey Liao/CNET
What’s the weak-equivalence principle?
The weak-equivalence principle is a weird one.
It pretty much says all objects in a gravitational field must fall in the same way when no other force is acting on them — I’m talking external interference like wind, a person kicking the object, another object bumping into it, you get the idea.
And yes, when I say all objects, I mean all objects. A feather; a piano; a basketball; you and me; anything you can imagine, really, according to this principle must fall in the exact same way.
The Microscope project sent a satellite into Earth’s orbit that contained two objects: a platinum alloy and titanium alloy. “The selection was based on technology considerations,” Rodrigues said, such as whether the materials were easy and feasible to make in a lab.
But most importantly for understanding the weak-equivalence principle, or WEP, these alloys were blasted into Earth’s orbit because stuff up there exists in our planet’s gravitational field without any other forces acting on them. Perfect for the testing criteria. Once the satellite was in space, the researchers began testing, for years, whether the platinum bit and titanium bit fell in the same way as they orbited Earth.
They did — to an extremely precise degree.
“The most thrilling part during the project was to develop an instrument and a mission that nobody has done before at such a level of accuracy — a new world to explore,” Rodrigues said. “As the pioneers of this new world, we expected at each moment to face phenomena that were not seen before because we were the first to enter.”
A capsule used during the Microscope mission.
ZARM/Selig – ONERA 2013
If you’re into the technicalities, the results of the experiment showed that the acceleration of one alloy’s fall differed from the other by no more than one part in 10^15. A difference beyond this quantity, the researchers say, would mean the WEP is violated by our current understanding of Einstein’s theory.
For the future, the team is working on a follow-up mission called Microscope 2, which Rodrigues says will test the weak-equivalence principle 100 times better.
However, this is probably as good as it’s going to get for at least a decade or so, the researchers say.
Great, what does this mean for me?
In a way, general relativity theory’s solidity is kind of a problem. That’s because even though it’s an essential blueprint for understanding our universe, it isn’t the only blueprint.
We also have constructs like the standard model of particle physics, which explains how things such as atoms and bosons work, and quantum mechanics, which accounts for things like electromagnetism and the uncertainty of existence.
But here’s the caveat.
Both of these concepts seem just as unbreakable as general relativity, yet aren’t compatible with it. So… something must be wrong. And that something is preventing us from creating a unified story of the physical universe. The standard model, for instance, famously can’t explain gravity, and general relativity doesn’t really consider quantum phenomena. It’s like a huge battle to be the ultimate theory.
The Microscope team standing with the satellite equipment, to the right.
ONERA/Rodrigues 2016
“Some theories expect a coupling between gravitation and some electromagnetic parameters,” Rodrigues offered as an example. “This coupling doesn’t exist in Einstein’s theory, that is why the WEP exists.”
We find ourselves at a crossroads.
But the bright side is that the vast majority of scientists consider all of these theories to be unfinished. Thus, if we can somehow find a way to finish them – locate a new coupling, for instance, as Rodrigues says, or identify a new particle to add to the standard model – that might lead us to the missing pieces of our universe’s puzzle.
“It should be a revolution in physics,” Rodrigues said, of breaking the WEP. “It will mean that we find a new force, or maybe a new particle like the graviton – it is the grail of the physicist.”
NASA Scientists Probe Dark Energy – Time To Rework Albert Einstein’s Theory of Gravity?
Dark energy illustration. Credit: Visualization by Frank Summers, Space Telescope Science Institute. Simulation by Martin White, UC Berkeley and Lars Hernquist, Harvard University
Could one of the biggest puzzles in astrophysics be solved by reworking Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity? Not yet, according to a new study co-authored by
A new study marks the latest effort to determine whether this is all simply a misunderstanding: that expectations for how gravity works at the scale of the entire universe are flawed or incomplete. This potential misunderstanding might help researchers explain dark energy. However, the study – one of the most precise tests yet of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity at cosmic scales – finds that the current understanding still appears to be correct. The study was from the international Dark Energy Survey, using the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile.
The results, authored by a group of scientists that includes some from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (
This image – the first released from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope – shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. Some of the galaxies appear smeared or stretched due to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. This effect can help scientists map the presence of dark matter in the universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
More than a century ago, Albert Einstein developed his Theory of General Relativity to describe gravity. Thus far it has accurately predicted everything from the orbit of Mercury to the existence of black holes. But some scientists have argued that if this theory can’t explain dark energy, then maybe they need to modify some of its equations or add new components.
To find out if that’s the case, members of the Dark Energy Survey looked for evidence that gravity’s strength has varied throughout the universe’s history or over cosmic distances. A positive finding would indicate that Einstein’s theory is incomplete, which might help explain the universe’s accelerating expansion. They also examined data from other telescopes in addition to Blanco, including the ESA (European Space Agency) Planck satellite, and reached the same conclusion.
Einstein’s theory still works, according to the study. So no there’s no explanation for dark energy yet. However, this research will feed into two upcoming missions: ESA’s Euclid mission, slated for launch no earlier than 2023, which has contributions from NASA; and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, targeted for launch no later than May 2027. Both telescopes will search for changes in the strength of gravity over time or distance.
Blurred Vision
How do scientists know what happened in the universe’s past? By looking at distant objects. A light-year is a measure of the distance light can travel in a year (about 6 trillion miles, or about 9.5 trillion kilometers). That means an object one light-year away appears to us as it was one year ago, when the light first left the object. And galaxies billions of light-years away appear to us as they did billions of years ago. The new study looked at galaxies stretching back about 5 billion years in the past. Euclid will peer 8 billion years into the past, and Roman will look back 11 billion years.
The galaxies themselves don’t reveal the strength of gravity, but how they look when viewed from Earth does. Most matter in our universe is dark matter, which does not emit, reflect, or otherwise interact with light. While physicists don’t know what it’s made of, they know it’s there, because its gravity gives it away: Large reservoirs of dark matter in our universe warp space itself. As light travels through space, it encounters these portions of warped space, causing images of distant galaxies to appear curved or smeared. This was on display in one of first images released from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
This video explains the phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which can cause images of galaxies to appear warped or smeared. This distortion is caused by gravity, and scientists can use the effect to detect dark matter, which does not emit or reflect light. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Dark Energy Survey scientists search galaxy images for more subtle distortions due to dark matter bending space, an effect called weak gravitational lensing. The strength of gravity determines the size and distribution of dark matter structures, and the size and distribution, in turn, determine how warped those galaxies appear to us. That’s how images can reveal the strength of gravity at different distances from Earth and distant times throughout the universe’s history. The group has now measured the shapes of over 100 million galaxies, and so far, the observations match what’s predicted by Einstein’s theory.
“There is still room to challenge Einstein’s theory of gravity, as measurements get more and more precise,” said study co-author Agnès Ferté, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher at JPL. “But we still have so much to do before we’re ready for Euclid and Roman. So it’s essential we continue to collaborate with scientists around the world on this problem as we’ve done with the Dark Energy Survey.”
Reference: “Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Constraints on extensions to ΛCDM with weak lensing and galaxy clustering” by DES Collaboration: T. M. C. Abbott, M. Aguena, A. Alarcon, O. Alves, A. Amon, J. Annis, S. Avila, D. Bacon, E. Baxter, K. Bechtol, M. R. Becker, G. M. Bernstein, S. Birrer, J. Blazek, S. Bocquet, A. Brandao-Souza, S. L. Bridle, D. Brooks, D. L. Burke, H. Camacho, A. Campos, A. Carnero Rosell, M. Carrasco Kind, J. Carretero, F. J. Castander, R. Cawthon, C. Chang, A. Chen, R. Chen, A. Choi, C. Conselice, J. Cordero, M. Costanzi, M. Crocce, L. N. da Costa, M. E. S. Pereira, C. Davis, T. M. Davis, J. DeRose, S. Desai, E. Di Valentino, H. T. Diehl, S. Dodelson, P. Doel, C. Doux, A. Drlica-Wagner, K. Eckert, T. F. Eifler, F. Elsner, J. Elvin-Poole, S. Everett, X. Fang, A. Farahi, I. Ferrero, A. Ferté, B. Flaugher, P. Fosalba, D. Friedel, O. Friedrich, J. Frieman, J. García-Bellido, M. Gatti, L. Giani, T. Giannantonio, G. Giannini, D. Gruen, R. A. Gruendl, J. Gschwend, G. Gutierrez, N. Hamaus, I. Harrison, W. G. Hartley, K. Herner, S. R. Hinton, D. L. Hollowood, K. Honscheid, H. Huang, E. M. Huff, D. Huterer, B. Jain, D. J. James, M. Jarvis, N. Jeffrey, T. Jeltema, A. Kovacs, E. Krause, K. Kuehn, N. Kuropatkin, O. Lahav, S. Lee, P.-F. Leget, P. Lemos, C. D. Leonard, A. R. Liddle, M. Lima, H. Lin, N. MacCrann, J. L. Marshall, J. McCullough , J. Mena-Fernández, F. Menanteau, R. Miquel, V. Miranda, J. J. Mohr, J. Muir, J. Myles, S. Nadathur, A. Navarro-Alsina, R. C. Nichol, R. L. C. Ogando, Y. Omori, A. Palmese, S. Pandey, Y. Park, M. Paterno, F. Paz-Chinchón, W. J. Percival, A. Pieres, A. A. Plazas Malagón, A. Porredon, J. Prat, M. Raveri, M. Rodriguez-Monroy, P. Rogozenski, R. P. Rollins, A. K. Romer, A. Roodman, R. Rosenfeld, A. J. Ross, E. S. Rykoff, S. Samuroff, C. Sánchez, E. Sanchez, J. Sanchez, D. Sanchez Cid, V. Scarpine, D. Scolnic, L. F. Secco, I. Sevilla-Noarbe, E. Sheldon, T. Shin, M. Smith, M. Soares-Santos, E. Suchyta, M. Tabbutt, G. Tarle, D. Thomas, C. To, A. Troja, M. A. Troxel, I. Tutusaus, T. N. Varga, M. Vincenzi, A. R. Walker, N. Weaverdyck, R. H. Wechsler, J. Weller, B. Yanny, B. Yin, Y. Zhang and J. Zuntz, 12 July 2022, Astrophysics > Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.
arXiv:2207.05766
