TECH

European satellite Galileo confirms Einstein's theory of relativity more accurately

Galileo will serve the next generation of satellite navigation, but it has just helped the world's scientific and physical community by proving one of Albert Einstein's famous Theory of Relativity. According to ESA, "the most accurate measurement ever made of how changes in gravity have changed the passage of time, a key element of the General Theory of Relativity," was made.
To perform the measurements, two European teams of physicists worked in parallel and independent ways. And both have managed to achieve improvements in about five times the accuracy of data on the gravitational redshift effect of time-dilation.
ESA highlights the importance of the work done by the teams, which were able to transform the theoretically possible results into a practical context. These results provided the first breakthrough in the gravitational redshift tests in 40 years. The project was successful thanks to the stabilizers of the atomic clocks of the Galileo satellites, and the use of laser retroreflectors, which allowed to accurately measure the orbit of the ground.
The teams took three years to refine the measurements, having to eliminate systematic effects related to clock errors and orbital slippage due to different factors, such as the overhang of the Earth's equator, the influence of the Earth's magnetic field, variations in temperature and until, according to ESA, the very pressure of solar radiation. Sapo