Michael Kramer is the author of "MPIfR."
The most challenging tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity have been done with telescopes around the world, including the Parkes radio telescope.
The team, led by Professor Michael Kramer from the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, showed that Einstein's theory still holds true.
Dr. Dick Manchester is a member of the research team and explained how this result provides us with a more precise understanding of the Universe.
The theory of general relativity describes how gravity works at large scales in the Universe, but it breaks down at the atomic scale.
We needed to find a way to test Einstein's theory at an intermediate scale. The double pulsar was found using the Parkes telescope.
He said that the double pulsar's observations over the past 16 years proved to be consistent with Einstein's general theory of relativity.
The double pulsar system is made up of two rapidly rotating compact stars that emit radio waves like a lighthouse and create very strong gravitational fields.
One star spins 45 times per second, while the other spins just 2.8 times per second. Every 2.5 hours, the stars complete an orbit.
The Parkes radio telescope is owned by the CSIRO.
The fabric of space-time is strained by the extreme accelerations in the double pulsar system. 85 million years' time is when the two pulsars are predicted to collide.
It is difficult to detect the effects of this energy loss. The ticks coming from the spinning pulsars are great tools to trace the small changes.
The ticks from the pulsar 'clocks' had taken 2,400 years to reach Earth, according to Associate Professor Adam Deller from the OzGrav.
The arrival times of more than 20 billion clock ticks were modeled by Dr. Deller.
We needed to know how far away the stars are to test general relativity.
The research team was able to see a tiny wobble in the star's positions every year, which revealed their distance from Earth.
Dr. Deller said that they will be back in the future using new radio telescopes and data analysis to try to find a weakness in general relativity that will lead to an even better theory.
The research is in a journal.
The Double Pulsar, Physical Review X, is a book by M. Kramer and his colleagues. There is a DOI titled "10.103/PhysRevX.11.041050".
The Physical Review X is in the journal.
Einstein's theory passed rigorous 16-year tests on December 13th, 2021.
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