Swiveling Satellites See Earth's Relativistic Wake

摘要

The world's a drag—and scientists have proved it. By studying the dance of two Earth-orbiting satellites, Italian physicists have detected the subtle twisting of spacetime around a massive, spinning object. The measurement is the most convincing sighting yet of a hard-to-spot consequence of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, says Neil Ashby, a physicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "There was a lot of criticism of previous results, but this is the first reasonably accurate measurement," Ashby says. Physicists Ignazio Ciufolini of the University of Lecce, Italy, and Erricos Pavlis of Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, describe the result this week in Nature.