Nov 12, 2023, 10:37 PM IST
Developed in 1905, it changed the way we think about space and time, energy and matter, and the universe itself. It is used to explain phenomena such as gravitational waves, black holes, neutron stars, quasars, and more.
As light travels across the universe, its wavelength shifts and stretches in several different ways, known as redshift. In 2011, a study of the light from hundreds of thousands of distant galaxies proved that gravitational redshift truly does exist, as Einstein suggested.
The e=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass. The equation has been used many times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic weapons.
When researchers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first-ever image of a black hole, they proved Einstein was right about some very specific things — namely, that each black hole has a point of no return called an event horizon.
Astronomers proved Einstein's black hole theories correct yet again when they discovered a strange pattern of X-rays being emitted near a black hole 800 million light-years from Earth.
Einstein’s theories seem to be valid in the quantum realm as well. The theory of relativity suggests that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, which means that space should look the same from all sides. In 2015, researchers proved that this effect is true even on the smallest scales when they measured the energy of two electrons moving in different directions around the nucleus of an atom.