One of NASA’s most complex measurement satellites has confirmed that Einstein was right all along: massive objects do distort the fabric of time and space. This ‘geodetic’ effect may only be part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but these results confirm a significant chunk of what the genius had hypothesized some 90 years ago. The rest of the theory – namely the ‘frame-dragging effect’ – will take another few months to be tested by the probe.

Could this be the first step towards designing a ‘gravity drive’ such as the one that allowed a ship to travel through space and time in the 1997 movie Event Horizon? Let’s hope that such a spacecraft will have a better fate than the Hollywood one!

Ninety years after he expounded his famous theory, a $700m Nasa probe has proved that the universe behaves as he said. Now the race is on to show that the other half of relativity also works.

Source: The Observer