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A theory on the origin of the Solar System must also be able to account for what we can observe today. Some observations that we can make about the Solar System include the following: Mass. The Sun contains over 99% of the Solar System’s mass while the planets contribute only about 0.2%. Angular Momentum.
Figure 9.4.1 9.4. 1: Left: A person standing on a scale in an elevator at rest at the surface of the Earth. Right: A person in an elevator that is accelerating in empty space with the same acceleration as that due to gravity at the Earth’s surface. The curvature of the light beam is exaggerated. Einstein postulated that it would be impossible ...
Jul 29, 2023 · The remarkable equivalence between matter and energy is given in one of the most famous equations: E = E = m c 2. In this equation, E stands for energy, m stands for mass, and c, the constant that relates the two, is the speed of light (3 ×108meters per second) ( 3 × 10 8 meters per second).
General relativity predicted that light would bend in a gravitational field. In 1919, British expeditions to Africa and South America observed a total solar eclipse to see if the position of stars near the Sun had changed. The observed effect was exactly what Einstein had predicted. Einstein instantly became world-famous.
- Space and Time
- GPS
- Mercury's Orbit
- Gravitational Lensing
- The Big Bang Theory
- Black Holes
- Dark Matter
- So That's Sorted Then... Well Not Quite
In November 1915, Einstein described gravity with the 10 heavy-handed field equations of general relativity, but what those equations basically say is — gravity is what you get whenever spacetime is warped, bent or stretched. Spacetime isn't something we normally talk about, because we think of space (up-down, left-right, forwards-backwards) as sep...
GPS relies on satellites orbiting high above us, where Earth's gravity is weaker (because spacetime is less warped by Earth's mass the further away you go). So the ultra-precise atomic clocks in the satellites run 45 millionths of a second faster per day than clocks here on the ground, deep in Earth's gravitational well. It's not that the clocks on...
Mercury's orbit has always been a little strange — it's got this weird little kink that none of the other planets have. The only way 19th century mathematicians could account for the kink was if Mercury was being pulled on by something else — like the gravity from another nearby planet, somewhere between Mercury and the Sun. But the proposed planet...
Warped space doesn't just affect matter and time — it bends light around massive objects too. The warped space acts like a lens, making things like distant stars and galaxies visible around closer massive objects that should be blocking them from view. This gravitational lensing was predicted by general relativity — and observations of the lensing ...
General relativity says that when spacetime stretches around a massive object, the light travelling through that spacetime stretches too. So light that starts out one colour ends up a slightly different (longer wavelength) colour after travelling through stretched spacetime. This colour shift is called cosmological redshift (red is the colour with ...
One of the earliest solutions to Einstein's general relativity equations was calculated by German physicist Karl Schwarzchild in 1916, when the theory was still hot off the press This result gave us one of nature's (and Hollywood's) great blockbusters — black holes. These infinitely dense remnants of massive dead stars are so tiny, and their gravit...
Dark matter remains one of the big mysteries of the universe. In fact, the only thing we know about it is that it has mass. And we only know that because the gravity resulting from its mass distorts the light coming from galaxies behind it. General relativity tells us how gravitational lensing should affect this light, and physicists can work backw...
With general relativity, Einstein gave physicists the maths that let them make predictions about the universe based on how gravity affected spacetime. It turned their ideas about the cosmos into science. It has passed every test that has been proposed, but there is a problem with the theory. It can never work with quantum theory, which is extremely...
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Black Holes. When a gravitational field, a curvature in spacetime, becomes sufficiently intense, the theory predicts that the matter causing the field can be literally crushed out of existence. The curvature becomes so intense that a hole is punched in the fabric of spacetime. This phenomenon is called a black hole.
The orbits of the planets lie in nearly the same plane with the Sun at the center. The planets revolve in the same direction. The planets mostly rotate in the same direction. The axes of rotation of the planets are mostly nearly perpendicular to the orbital plane. The oldest moon rocks are 4.5 billion years.
