Wayward Satellites Test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity

Two independent research teams—one led by Pacôme Delva of the Paris Observatory in France, the other by Sven Herrmann of the University of Bremen in Germany—monitored the wayward satellites to look for holes in Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “General relativity continues to be the most accurate description of gravity, and so far it has withstood a huge number of experimental and observational tests,” says Eric Poisson, a physicist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, who was not involved in the new research. In a previous gravitational redshift test, conducted in 1976, when the Gravity Probe-A suborbital rocket was launched into space with an atomic clock onboard, researchers observed that general relativity predicted the clock’s frequency shift with an uncertainty of 1.4 × 10–4.

Source: www.scientificamerican.com