Chalk up yet another win for Einstein.
A twist in the fabric of spacetime is causing the orbit of one stellar corpse to teeter around another stellar corpse, researchers report. And the relativistic corkscrew is helping astronomers reconstruct the final days of these two long-dead stars.
According to general relativity, any spinning mass drags spacetime around with it, like a hand mixer in molasses. One way to see this “frame dragging” is to keep a careful eye on anything circling the spinning object on a tilted orbit — the spacetime maelstrom will make the orbit wobble, or precess.
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