Welcome to your Monday open thread. I’m back, kittens! Did you miss me? I know, you didn’t even notice I was gone.
A Hasidic newspaper photoshopped Hillary Clinton and another woman out of the situation room picture taken during the OBL operation. I guess it’s too subversive to see women making important national security decisions.
This is just a really cool science story. A NASA probe has proven some previously untested effects from Einstein’s theories.
Launched in 2004, the Gravity Probe B mission used four ultraprecise gyroscopes—devices used to measure orientation—housed in a satellite to measure two aspects of Einstein’s theory about gravity.
The first is the geodetic effect, which is the warping of space and time—or spacetime—around a gravitational body, such as a planet.
One common way to visualize the geodetic effect is to think of Earth as a bowling ball and spacetime as a trampoline. Earth’s gravity warps spacetime the same way a bowling ball weighs down the middle of a trampoline.
The second effect of gravity tested by Gravity Probe B is frame dragging, which is the amount that a spinning object pulls the fabric of spacetime along with it.
Just how big is the geodetic effect? It’s really, really small, that’s why Einstein thought it was probably untestable.
Sifting through the data, the team found evidence of an angular change in the gyroscopes’ orientation of about 6,600 milliarcseconds over the course of a year.
A milliarcsecond, Everitt explained, “is the width of a human hair seen at the distance of 10 miles [16 kilometers]. It really is a rather small angle, and this is the accuracy which Gravity Probe B had to achieve.”
Amazing science.