Thursday, March 11, 2010

Einstein's Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale

Ker Than

for National Geographic News

Published March 10, 2010

The theory of gravity proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago can explain the dance of galaxies around one another just as well as it can model the motion of planets around the sun, according to a new study.

The finding suggests that the invisible substance called dark matter and the even more mysterious force known as dark energy are not just figments of physicists' imaginations.

For centuries Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation worked well enough to explain gravity on Earth. But astronomers eventually saw discrepancies in the way larger objects such as planets interacted.

Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1916, proposed that gravity works on large scales because matter warps the fabric of space and time, also known as space-time. (See timerCount('article_body');

I'd just like to point out that I already knew this. That is all.

Posted via web from kquade's blog

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