Albert Einstein's theories of relativity have been proven to be true time and again in the more than 100 years following their publication.
Legendary physicist Albert Einstein was a thinker ahead of his time. Born March 14, 1879, Einstein entered a world where the dwarf planet Pluto had yet to be discovered, and the idea of spaceflight was a distant dream. Despite the technical limitations of his time, Einstein published his famous theory of general relativity in 1915, which made predictions about the nature of the universe that would be proven accurate time and again for more than 100 years to come.
When researchers using the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first-ever image of a black hole, they proved Einstein was right about some very specific things — namely, that each black hole has a point of no return called an event horizon, which should be roughly circular and of a predictable size based on the mass of the black hole. The EHT's groundbreaking black hole image showed this prediction was exactly right.
4. Wobbly black hole partnersStudying gravitational waves can reveal the secrets of the massive, distant objects that released them. By studying the gravitational waves emitted by a pair of slowly colliding binary black holes in 2022, physicists confirmed that the massive objects wobbled — or precessed — in their orbits as they swirled ever closer to one another, just as Einstein predicted they should.
7. A gravitational magnifying glassAccording to Einstein, if an object is sufficiently massive, it should bend space-time in such a way that distant light emitted behind the object will appear magnified . This effect is called gravitational lensing, and has been used extensively to hold a magnifying glass up to objects in the deep universe. Famously, the James Webb Space Telescope's first deep field image used the gravitational lensing effect of a galaxy cluster 4.
10. Atoms on the moveEinstein's theories also hold true in the quantum realm, it seems. Relativity suggests that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum, meaning that space should look the same from every direction. In 2015, researchers proved this effect is true even on the smallest scale, when they measured the energy of two electrons moving in different directions around an atom's nucleus.
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