Not too long ago, I wrote about how alternate theories to general relativity have been having a tough time as of late. Well, things just got even tougher.
The equivalence principle was on trial for this experiment. One of the basic tenets of relativity is that two objects, no matter what their mass or what they're made of, they are affected by gravity in the same way. This has been tested many times on Earth (and famously, on the Moon), but never with really dense objects. Alternative theories to relativity assume that the equivalence principle breaks down at high density, since up to now, there's been room to work.
The test involved a neutron star-white dwarf pair, and watching the orbit of the neutron star. If there were variations in its orbit, it would have been in violation of the equivalence principle, and the various alternate theories would have some ground to stand on. But there was no variation, and once again, general relativity was proven correct. And not only that, but this test improved the accuracy of the previous best gravity test by a factor of 10. Alternate gravity theories thus have a lot less room to work.
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