Astronomers using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, have made the most precise test yet of Einstein’s general theory of relativity outside the Milky Way. The nearby galaxy ESO 325-G004 acts as a strong gravitational lens, distorting light from a distant galaxy behind it to create an Einstein ring around its centre. By comparing the mass of ESO 325-G004 with the curvature of space around it, the astronomers found that gravity on these astronomical length-scales behaves as predicted by general relativity. This rules out some alternative theories of gravity.
The release, images and videos are available on:
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1819/
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The ESO Education and Public Outreach Department
21 June 2018
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Interview with: Martino Romaniello
15 June 2018: ESO is proud of being the most productive ground-based observatory in the world, making observations that led to over one thousand scientific papers in 2017 alone. But to produce such ...
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