Greek Scientist Says Einstein Right

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which provides that gravity “reigns” in the universe, has again been confirmed thanks to an astronomical discovery made by a large international scientific team, led by Yiannis Antoniadis from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

Scientists at the institute said they observed a neutron star (a pulsar) and a white dwarf which is the bright remnant of a dead star. The two stars are orbiting around each other at a distance of 7,000 light years from Earth.

The neutron star has a diameter of only 20 kilometers but two times more weight than this of the Sun. It has also 300 billion times stronger gravity than the gravitational force of the Earth’s surface. In the center of the star, there is an one billion tones matter which is compressed in points whose size is similar to that of a lump of sugar.

The researchers used several ground-based telescopes to observe the two stars. They focused on pulsars’ radio emissions. “We believed that the conditions in this system were so extreme that would cause cracks in the theory of general relativity but eventually Einstein’s predictions proved accurate enough,” said Paulo Freire, a member of the research team.

Antoniades, according to Nature and Space.com, observed as a doctoral student in binary star system using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, and discovered that this Neutron star has the greater mass than any other star pulsar ever discovered.

Antoniades, born in Didimoticho, studied physics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Since March 2010 he has been a doctoral student at the Planck Institute, studying binary star systems, pulsars, using optical telescopes and radio telescopes in different regions of the world.