Tests of general relativity

Tests of general relativity serve to establish observational evidence for the theory of general relativity. The first three tests, proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915, concerned the "anomalous" precession of the perihelion of Mercury, the bending of light in gravitational fields, and the gravitational redshift. The precession of Mercury was already known; experiments showing light bending in accordance with the predictions of general relativity were performed in 1919, with increasingly precise measurements made in subsequent tests; and scientists claimed to have measured the gravitational redshift in 1925, although measurements sensitive enough to actually confirm the theory were not made until 1954. A more accurate program starting in 1959 tested general relativity in the weak gravitational field limit, severely limiting possible deviations from the theory. In the 1970s, scientists began to make additional tests, starting with Irwin Shapiro's measurement of the relativistic time delay in radar signal travel time near the Sun. Beginning in 1974, Hulse, Taylor and others studied the behaviour of binary pulsars experiencing much stronger gravitational fields than those found in the Solar System. Both in the weak field limit (as in the Solar System) and with the stronger fields present in systems of binary pulsars the predictions of general relativity have been extremely well tested. In February 2016, the Advanced LIGO team announced that they had directly detected gravitational waves from a black hole merger. This discovery, along with additional detections announced in June 2016 and June 2017, tested general relativity in the very strong field limit, observing to date no deviations from theory. Albert Einstein proposed three tests of general relativity, subsequently called the "classical tests" of general relativity, in 1916: the perihelion precession of Mercury's orbit the deflection of light by the Sun the gravitational redshift of light In the letter to The Times (of London) on November 28, 1919, he described the theory of relativity and thanked his English colleagues for their understanding and testing of his work.