From Emily Conover at ScienceNews:
Observations of a trio of dead stars have confirmed that a foundation of Einstein’s gravitational theory holds even for ultradense objects with strong gravitational fields.
The complex orbital dance of the three former stars conforms to a rule known as the strong equivalence principle, researchers reported January 10 at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. That agreement limits theories that predict Einstein’s theory, general relativity, should fail at some level.
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Many physicists expect the strong equivalence principle to be violated on some level. General relativity doesn’t mesh well with quantum mechanics, the theory that reigns on very small scales. Adjustments to general relativity that attempt to combine these theories tend to result in a violation of the strong equivalence principle, says physicist Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved with the research.
The strong equivalence principle might still fail at levels too tiny for this test to catch. More.
Ah, another grant proposal in the offing… shoud be interesting.
See also: Lack of a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) leaves physicists frustrated
Dusting off a 1970s Theory of Everything could be bad news for supersymmetry
and
Theoretical physicist has a hard time convincing peers to accept reality