Tests of general relativity

Tests of general relativity serve to establish observational evidence for the theory of general relativity. The first three tests, proposed by Einstein in 1915, concerned the 'anomalous' precession of the perihelion of Mercury, the bending of light in gravitational fields, and the gravitational redshift. The precession of Mercury was already known; experiments showing light bending in line with the predictions of general relativity was found in 1919, with increasing precision measurements done in subsequent tests, and astrophysical measurement of the gravitational redshift was claimed to be measured in 1925, although measurements sensitive enough to actually confirm the theory were not done until 1954. A program of more accurate tests starting in 1959 tested the various predictions of general relativity with a further degree of accuracy in the weak gravitational field limit, severely limiting possible deviations from the theory. Tests of general relativity serve to establish observational evidence for the theory of general relativity. The first three tests, proposed by Einstein in 1915, concerned the 'anomalous' precession of the perihelion of Mercury, the bending of light in gravitational fields, and the gravitational redshift. The precession of Mercury was already known; experiments showing light bending in line with the predictions of general relativity was found in 1919, with increasing precision measurements done in subsequent tests, and astrophysical measurement of the gravitational redshift was claimed to be measured in 1925, although measurements sensitive enough to actually confirm the theory were not done until 1954. A program of more accurate tests starting in 1959 tested the various predictions of general relativity with a further degree of accuracy in the weak gravitational field limit, severely limiting possible deviations from the theory. In the 1970s, additional tests began to be made, starting with Irwin Shapiro's measurement of the relativistic time delay in radar signal travel time near the sun. Beginning in 1974, Hulse, Taylor and others have studied the behaviour of binary pulsars experiencing much stronger gravitational fields than those found in the Solar System. Both in the weak field limit (as in the Solar System) and with the stronger fields present in systems of binary pulsars the predictions of general relativity have been extremely well tested locally. In February 2016, the Advanced LIGO team announced that they had directly detected gravitational waves from a black hole merger. This discovery, along with additional detections announced in June 2016 and June 2017, tested general relativity in the very strong field limit, observing to date no deviations from theory. Albert Einstein proposed three tests of general relativity, subsequently called the 'classical tests' of general relativity, in 1916: In the letter to the London Times on November 28, 1919, he described the theory of relativity and thanked his English colleagues for their understanding and testing of his work. He also mentioned three classical tests with comments: Under Newtonian physics, a two-body system consisting of a lone object orbiting a spherical mass would trace out an ellipse with the center of mass of the system at a focus. The point of closest approach, called the periapsis (or, because the central body in the Solar System is the Sun, perihelion), is fixed. A number of effects in the Solar System cause the perihelia of planets to precess (rotate) around the Sun. The principal cause is the presence of other planets which perturb one another's orbit. Another (much less significant) effect is solar oblateness. Mercury deviates from the precession predicted from these Newtonian effects. This anomalous rate of precession of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit was first recognized in 1859 as a problem in celestial mechanics, by Urbain Le Verrier. His reanalysis of available timed observations of transits of Mercury over the Sun's disk from 1697 to 1848 showed that the actual rate of the precession disagreed from that predicted from Newton's theory by 38″ (arc seconds) per tropical century (later re-estimated at 43″ by Simon Newcomb in 1882). A number of ad hoc and ultimately unsuccessful solutions were proposed, but they tended to introduce more problems. In general relativity, this remaining precession, or change of orientation of the orbital ellipse within its orbital plane, is explained by gravitation being mediated by the curvature of spacetime. Einstein showed that general relativity agrees closely with the observed amount of perihelion shift. This was a powerful factor motivating the adoption of general relativity. Although earlier measurements of planetary orbits were made using conventional telescopes, more accurate measurements are now made with radar. The total observed precession of Mercury is 574.10″±0.65 per century relative to the inertial ICRF. This precession can be attributed to the following causes: