White dwarf causes strange relativity effect called frame dragging

Enlarge / The lit up rings in this image are caused by wobbles in a pulsar's axis of rotation. (credit: NASA)

Ask about some mind-bending physics, and people will tend to focus on the many mind-bending oddities of quantum mechanics. But there's no shortage of strangeness in another one of physics' cornerstone theories: relativity. From time being relative to things getting more massive as they accelerate, there are lots of head scratchers in relativity.

But the thing that may top the strangeness scale is an effect called "frame dragging," where a massive rotating object distorts the space-time around it. While it was first identified as a relativistic effect shortly after relativity was proposed, we weren't in any position to test it until the satellite era. While a number of missions have produced results consistent with relativity, the experiments had rather large uncertainties.

Now, an international team of scientists has used an interstellar laboratory to test the proposal. Taking advantage of a large white dwarf with a nearby neutron star, the researchers have detected frame dragging effects in the regular pulses of emission from the neutron star.

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