By Dr. Richard Anantua This past decade has been a landmark in the history of black hole astrophysics— bringing precise experimental confirmation to bear upon revolutionary predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity from just over a century ago. LIGO’s 2015 observation of the “chirp” signal characteristic of the merger of two black holes marked a 5.1 sigma detection of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein in 1916, and the first measurement of an astronomical signal outside the electromagnetic spectrum. In 2018, the European Southern Observatory’s GRAVITY (4 very large infrared telescopes) detected gravitational redshift from the passage of the star S2 at a near-relativistic speed of 0.03c near the pericenter…
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