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Astronomers Prove To Einstein That Stars Can Warp Light (theverge.com)
Astronomers have observed for the first time ever a distant star warp the light of another star, "making it seem as though the object changed its position in the sky," reports The Verge. The discovery is especially noteworthy as Albert Einstein didn't think such an observation would be possible. From the report: These events require stars that are very far apart to line up perfectly. That's why Einstein once wrote that "there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly." Our telescope technology has become far more sophisticated than in Einstein's day -- which is what allowed us to observe something he thought we'd never see. In 2014, a group of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted a rare type of microlensing, when a dense white dwarf star passed in front of another star thousands of light-years away. The stars weren't exactly aligned, but they were close enough that the white dwarf made it seem like the background star performed a small loop in the sky. "It looks like the white dwarf pushed it out of the way," Terry Oswalt, an astronomer at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who was not involved in this discovery but wrote a perspective piece in Science, tells The Verge. "That's not what happened, of course. It just looks like that." The astronomers also used the apparent movement of the background star to measure the mass of the passing white dwarf, a novel technique detailed in a paper published today in Science. And they say this isn't the last time they'll make measurements like this either. Now that they've figured out how to spot these kinds of lensing events, they're hoping to find even more with new ground- and space-based telescopes that are coming online soon.
The sun is a star, and the light-bending capacity of that thing has been demonstrated quite a while ago. Also, proving something to somebody dead is not possible. Are these headlines intentional bait for wisesh*ts?
Let's see.
Einstein isn't going to get anything proven to him. He is dead.
However, he showed that this should be true, why would it need to be proven to him?
Let alone the fact that gravitational lensing, which uses this exact effect, is a common technique these days.
What is the point?
May 29 1919 is very, very old news.
No shit? This was proven like, a century ago. And astronomers have been using gravitational lensing as a kind of natural telescope for years now. Somehow a direct observation of star to star lensing hasn't been seen before, so uhhh, cool I guess. But this isn't a scientific discovery by any means.
I tried to measure it, but ran into a Heisenberg problem. Every time I was about to measure a bosom, it moved away.
I also usually felt a strange stinging sensation in my cheek...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The headline is worse than that. It implies that Einstein didn't believe in the existence of the phenomenon in question...
Oh it's even worse because the reason Einstein (and everyone else) believed his theory of general relativity was correct was due to the Arthur Eddington's expedition to view the solar eclipse of 1919 where he observed that the sun bent the light of a distant star changing its apparent position!
What is even more insane is that both the articles linked in the summary start out mentioning this 1919 observation proving that the submitter either never read the articles he was submitting or did not understand what they were talking about. This article is clearly a contender for the most ignorant article on slashdot award.