Facts about General Relativity
- 09
Spacetime curvature around Earth causes clocks on GPS satellites orbiting at 20,200 kilometers altitude to run 38 microseconds faster per day than ground clocks, requiring General Relativity corrections for accurate positioning.
- 08
Extreme gravitational fields near massive objects cause spacetime curvature so severe that GPS satellites orbiting Earth must account for relativistic time dilation or their position calculations would accumulate 38 microseconds of error daily.
- 07
Rotating black holes predicted by Kerr's 1963 solution to General Relativity equations can possess an ergosphere where objects are forced to rotate with spacetime itself.
- 06
A neutron star compressed to Earth's size would weigh 6 billion tons per teaspoon, a density General Relativity predicts forms when massive stars collapse.
- 05
At the solar system's center, the Sun's mass curves spacetime so strongly that Earth's orbit requires a 4-dimensional explanation that Newton's laws cannot provide.
- 04
Gravitational waves from merging neutron stars detected by LIGO in August 2017 traveled 130 million light-years to reach Earth, confirming Einstein's 1916 General Relativity prediction.
- 03
Mercury's orbit precesses 43 arcseconds per century beyond Newton's predictions, a discrepancy Einstein's General Relativity equations explained perfectly in 1915.
- 02
Time dilation near a black hole's event horizon is so extreme that one hour for a stationary observer equals 16 years for someone hovering at the photon sphere.
- 01
In 1919, Arthur Eddington's solar eclipse observations confirmed Einstein's General Relativity prediction that massive objects bend light by 1.75 arcseconds.