10 Discoveries show Einstein was correct about the universe, and one discovery disproves his theory.

Albert Einstein, a renowned physicist, was a thinker who was ahead of his time. Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, into a world where the dwarf planet Pluto was still undiscovered and space travel was still only a distant fantasy. Despite the technological limitations of the time, Einstein published his famous theory of general relativity in 1915. This theory contained predictions about the nature of the universe that would repeatedly be confirmed to be true for more than a century.

Here are ten recent findings that demonstrate Einstein was correct about the nature of the cosmos a century ago, along with one finding that contradicts his theory.

1. The first black hole image

According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity is a result of space-time warping; in other words, the more massive an object is, the more space-time it will curve, causing smaller objects to fall toward it. Black holes are huge objects that warp space-time so drastically that not even light can escape them, according to the theory, which also predicts their existence.

Einstein was proven to be correct about a number of details when researchers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first-ever image of a black hole. They discovered that every black hole has an event horizon, which should be roughly circular and have a predictable size based on the black hole's mass. The ground-breaking black hole image from the EHT revealed

2. "Echos" from black holes

When astronomers noticed a peculiar pattern of X-rays being emitted close to a black hole 800 million light-years from Earth, they knew that Einstein's theories about black holes were accurate once more. The team observed the predicted "luminous echoes" of X-ray light, which were emitted behind the black hole but still visible from Earth because of how the black hole bent space-time around it, in addition to the expected X-ray emissions flashing from the front of the black hole.

3. Grazing waves

Huge rippling in the fabric of space-time known as gravitational waves is another phenomenon explained by Einstein's general theory of relativity. These waves are the result of collisions between the heaviest celestial bodies, such as neutron stars and black holes. In 2015, physicists used a specialized detector called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to confirm the existence of gravitational waves. Since then, dozens of additional gravitational wave examples have been discovered, further demonstrating Einstein's correctness.

4. Partners in wobbly black holes

Gravitational waves can be studied to learn more about the massive, far-off objects that produced them. Physics experts confirmed that the massive objects wobbled — or precessed — in their orbits as they swirled ever closer to one another in 2022 by analyzing the gravitational waves released by a pair of slowly colliding binary black holes.

5. A dancing star on a spirograph

After 27 years of research, scientists were able to observe Einstein's theory of precession in action once more as a star orbited a supermassive black hole. The star's orbit was observed to "dance" forward in a rosette pattern after completing two complete orbits around the black hole as opposed to moving in a constant elliptical path. Einstein's theories about how an incredibly small object should orbit around a relatively enormous one were confirmed by this movement.

6. A neutron star that drags its frames

Not only black holes, but also the incredibly dense remains of dead stars, can cause space-time to bend around them. Scientists examined the orbits of a neutron star and a white dwarf (two different types of collapsed, dead stars) for the previous 20 years in 2020 and discovered a long-term drift in the two objects' orbits. The researchers hypothesized that this drift was likely brought on by a phenomenon known as frame dragging, in which the white dwarf tugged on space-time just enough to gradually change the neutron star's orbit. Once more, this supports the predictions made by Einstein's theory of relativity.

7. A gravitational magnifying glass

Einstein proposed that a sufficiently massive object should cause space-time to bend, magnifying distant light coming from behind the object (as seen from Earth). Gravitational lensing is an effect that has been widely used to hold a magnifying glass up to objects in the deep universe. The

gravitational lensing effect of a galaxy cluster 4.6 billion light-years away was famously used in the James Webb Space Telescope's first deep field image to significantly magnify the light from galaxies more than 13 billion light-years away.

8. Adorn it with an Einstein ring.

Gravitational lensing can take many different forms, but one of them is so striking that physicists had to give it Einstein's name. Scientists refer to a "Einstein ring" as the perfect halo that results when a distant object's light is magnified and wrapped around a large foreground object. These magnificent objects can be found all over space and have been photographed by both professional astronomers and amateur researchers.

9. The evolving cosmos

Redshift is the term for the various ways in which the wavelength of light changes and stretches as it moves through the universe. The universe's expansion is the most well-known cause of redshift. In order to explain this apparent expansion in his other equations, Einstein proposed a number known as the cosmological constant. A different kind of "gravitational redshift," which happens when light loses energy while leaving a depression in space-time made by massive objects like galaxies, was also foreseen by Einstein. A study of the light from millions of far-off galaxies in 2011 established the existence of gravitational redshift, as predicted by Einstein.

10. Atoms in motion

It appears that Einstein's theories also hold true in the quantum world. According to relativity, the speed of light is constant in a vacuum, so space ought to appear uniform from all angles. When scientists measured the energy of two electrons traveling in opposite directions around an atom's nucleus in 2015, they demonstrated that this effect holds true even at the tiniest scales. The energy difference between the electrons remained constant, no matter which direction they moved, confirming that piece of Einstein's theory

11. Is "spooky action-at-a-distance" incorrect?

Linking particles can appear to communicate with one another over great distances faster than the speed of light in a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, but they only "choose" a state to exist once they are measured. Known for deriding this phenomenon as "spooky action-at-a-distance," Einstein insisted that no influence can travel faster than the speed of light and that objects have a state whether or not we can observe it.

However, in a large-scale, international experiment in which millions of entangled particles were measured all over the world, scientists discovered that the particles appeared to choose a state only at the time of measurement and no earlier.

"We demonstrated that Einstein's worldview, according to which nothing has properties unless you observe it and nothing travels faster than light,