The "double pulsar", discovered in 2003 by Marta Burgay of INAF of Cagliari, was the testing ground for a study aimed at probing the limits of Einstein's theory of general relativity through a series of rigorous and unprecedented scientific tests. The study, which involved seven radio telescopes and a team of researchers from ten countries around the world including that of INAF in Sardinia, examined 16 years of observations of the double pulsar, confirming the relativistic effects predicted by the theory at 99.99%.

Thanks to this new study, some of the effects resulting from Einstein's theory have been observed for the first time ever.

"We have studied a system of compact stars, which is an unrivaled laboratory for testing theories of gravity in the presence of strong gravitational fields," explains the coordinator of the international research team, Michael Kramer of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (Mpifr). in Bonn, Germany. "To our great joy - he continues - we were able to test a cornerstone of Einstein's theory, the energy emitted in the form of the emission of gravitational waves, with a precision 25 times better than the pulsar of Hulse and Taylor (which allowed them to overcome the Nobel Prize in 1993) and a thousand times better than what gravitational wave detectors have done so far ".

"This work shows that, in nature, the emission of gravitational waves behaves, at least at 99.99%, as predicted by general relativity - explains Andrea Possenti, first researcher at INAF in Cagliari and also a co-author of the study - The future observation of any deviation from this theory would on the other hand constitute a fundamental step towards a unified theory for all the physics of the Universe, that is, a theory capable of combining the phenomena related to gravity with those related to quantum physics ".

(Unioneonline / vl)

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