BHUBANESWAR: More than a century after Albert Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, a group of astronomers have used its laws to measure the mass of a star in the galaxy that the legendary scientist had thought impossible to achieve.
In a revolutionary breakthrough in the field of gravitational deflection, the researchers led by Odia scientist Kailash Chandra Sahu has successfully validated Einstein’s general theory of relativity by measuring mass of a white dwarf, the dead remnant of a star that was once similar to the Sun.
The theory, presented by Einstein in 1915, describes how gravity can distort the path of light, altering its trajectory.
Though Albert Einstein had provided first evidence of the theory using the deflection of light from a background star by the gravitational field of the Sun, he was then pessimistic about its real time application and had written in a Science paper in 1936 that ‘there is no hope to observe the phenomenon directly’.
The scientists and researchers from the US-based Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) have, however, been able to see this asymmetric phenomenon in action in the white dwarf, called Stein 2051 B, with the help of Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
Odia scientist Kailash Chandra Sahu and his team applied the concept to the white dwarf which crossed close in front of a more distant normal star. “Our work opens an entirely new method for measuring the masses of stars,” Sahu said in an e-mail interview.
A native of nondescript coastal village Bellagam in Odisha’s Ganjam district, Sahu (57), fondly known as planet hunter, was a gold medalist in Physics from Berhampur University in 1977. He did his PhD in Astronomy from Gujarat University in 1985 and researched at Institute of Astrophysics in Paris and Spain before joining STSI in 1995.