An international team of researchers published the latest results in the journal Physical Review Letters.
General Relativity, publishedAlbert Einstein in 1915, describes how gravity works and how it relates to time and space. But because it does not take into account observations of quantum phenomena, researchers look for deviations from the theory with increasing levels of accuracy and in different situations.
In a space experiment, which is carried out onOn a dedicated MICROSCOPE satellite, scientists measure the Eötvös coefficient, which relates the accelerations of two free-falling objects, with extremely high accuracy. According to the principle of equivalence of the forces of gravity and inertia, objects in a gravitational field fall in the same way when no other forces act on them, even if they have different masses or compositions.
An artistic illustration of a test of the principle of weak equivalence. Image: Carin Cain, APS
To measure the Eötvös coefficient, the researcherstracked the acceleration of platinum-titanium test masses as they orbited the Earth on the MICROSCOPE satellite. The experimental instrument used electrostatic forces to keep pairs of test masses in the same position relative to each other and looked for potential differences in these forces that would indicate differences in the objects' accelerations.
The results of the study showed that whenmeasurements with an accuracy of 10-15 (one part per million billion), there are no differences in accelerations, which means that the principle of equivalence continues to work. Scientists are planning new experiments to increase the accuracy by two orders of magnitude to 10-17.
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