Astronomers have found a new three-star system that could challenge Einstein's theory of General Relativity, according to UPI.com.
University of British Columbia astronomer Ingrid Stairs and her colleagues are part of a team of researchers looking into a system of two dwarf stars and a pulsar that's "packed" into a location smaller than Earth's orbit around the sun.
The pulsar, located approximately 4,200 light-years away from our planet, is spinning 366 times per second, according to a University of British Columbia press release.
Researchers were able to find the pulsar thanks to the Green Bank Telescope.
The team found the pulsar within close orbit of a white dwarf star and the two are in orbit with a more distant white star as well, according to Stairs.
The triple-star system offers the best chance researchers have ever had to disprove Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity.
"By doing very high-precision timing of the pulses coming from the pulsar, we can test for such a deviation from the strong equivalence principle at a sensitivity several orders of magnitude greater than ever before available," Stairs said in a university news release this week. "Finding a deviation from the strong equivalence principle would indicate a breakdown of General Relativity and would point us toward a new, revised theory of gravity."
Einstein's theory claims that the "effect of gravity on a body does not depend on the nature or internal structure of that body," according to BBC News. It essentially explains the expansion of the universe, its history, and why planets move the way they do.
The General Relativity theory was first published in 1916 by Einstein.
"This triple system gives us a natural cosmic laboratory far better than anything found before for learning exactly how such three-body systems work and potentially for detecting problems with General Relativity that physicists expect to see under extreme conditions," said study leader Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in a statement, according to UPI.com.
The new study was published in the Jan. 5 issue of Nature.
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