The most amazing fact about science is indeed its breathtaking effort to prove the things out. Be it right or wrong, all that we need is the ultimate evidence?The recent one that scientists captured is another evidence to validate that Albert Einstein was right again after decades of his parting. Yes! to put an end to one of the hypothetical assumptions we had so far.
In 1915, Einstein put forth his observation that a strong gravitational pull of a massive object like a black hole affects the orbit of others around it, mainly stars and other heavenly bodies. A concept expressed then had no means to get proved experimentally. From then on, science was in a hurry to find whether Einstein was right.
We may have seen headlines questioning Einstein, reinforcing his concepts and even trying to prove them wrong. However, this one definitely is another end to such arguments and rumours behind.
The European Southern Observatory’s huge telescope located in Atacama desert in Chile, from its 27 yrs of effective observation on the star named S2, orbiting a massive black hole in our galaxy, gave awesome data that we never had before. Sagittarius A* may be familiar to us, but going to reveal in future will be some deep hidden mysteries about this black hole. S2 was a subject of interest from its early stages of observation, but now what makes it so important is its orbital speciality around Sagittarius A*. The data from ESO’s telescope were analysed in collaboration with the GRAVITY team to finally observe that S2 follow an Orbit to Orbit motion resulting in a Rosette shape of movement around the black hole. This change or shift in orbit is due to the ‘wobbling’ of the star due to the gravitational pull of the black hole.
The movement shows the warping of space-time or the Schwarzschild precession. And the main thing to note down is that according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, a massive body like a black hole would “bind” or warp the geometry of the fabric of space-time. Observations on S2 is hence a distinct evidence to prove the precision of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Even though we had already tackled out the odd orbit of Mercury around the Sun as an evidence for the same, it is less emphasised as the sun is not as massive to exaggerate on gravitational pull when compared to a black hole. But Sagittarius A* is almost 4 million times in mass as that of our sun and is as far as 26000 light-years from it. This research published on April 16, 2020 in the Astronomy and Astrophysical journal brings out that Sagittarius A*is expected to be a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way galaxy and also a proof to one of the pillars of science.
Even though we are heading towards the stream of advancement and development, what science is also aggravating is to prove the existing.
Not only appreciating the team for its findings but also for their efforts to prove that our Genius was on the beam again
–Sreebala P S
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