Japanese team confirms that Einstein’s theory works throughout the universe

A new three-dimensional map of part of the universe, created by a massive international team of researchers, is refuting the idea that Einstein’s theory of general relativity could be breaking down in the faraway universe, according to a new report in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

“We tested the theory of general relativity further than anyone else ever has. It’s a privilege to be able to publish our results 100 years after Einstein proposed his theory,” study author Teppei Okumura, an astrophysicist from The University of Tokyo, said in a news release.

In the 1990s, astrophysicists established that the universe accelerating its continuous expansion. This could potentially be caused by mysterious dark matter, or a breakdown of Einstein’s general relativity theory, which says gravity can bend space and time.

To test Einstein’s theory, researchers built an enormous 3D map of 3000 galaxies located 13 billion light years from Earth using data from the FastSound sky survey. The velocities and clustering of the galaxies revealed Einstein’s theory still holds up in the very distant corners of the universe.

Guess what– Einstein was right

The results indicated that the expansion could be driven by a cosmological constant noted in Einstein’s famous theory.

The conclusions of studies are constantly either challenging Einstein’s theory or supporting it. One study published in February posited the first-ever viable model of a ringed-black hole; the existence of which would result in the appearance of a “naked singularity” that would cause the basis of general relativity to fall apart.

General relativity states that singularities can be found at the center of a black hole, and are encompassed by an “event horizon” where powerful gravity keeps it from being seen from the outside. If singularities remain hidden, there tenets of general relativity hold true, but if one were ever visible, it would indicate that it existed outside of an event horizon and would signify an object that had fallen into an infinite density.

Theoretical physicists hypothesize that this type of phenomenon, referred to as a naked singularity, could exist in higher dimensions. If they were to exist, general relativity breaks down.

However, Einstein’s theory got a major boost in the same month when researchers detected gravitational waves, or the rippling of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes.

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Image credit: EPA

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