Einstein and his relativity in Celestial Mechanics

Einstein and his relativity in Celestial Mechanics

Albert Einstein never agreed with the accuracy of Newton's theory regarding the motion of the planets. What Einstein did was to apply his Theory of General Relativity to celestial mechanics, demonstrating the existence of gravitational radiation, a discovery that led him, along with other important contributions, to obtain the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 .

For the eminent German physicist, gravity originated from a curvature produced in spacetime.

Space, time and gravity

Einstein said that an orbit is actually a straight line. Therefore, when an object falls towards another, what it does is travel in a straight line through spacetime. But the curvature of time ends up doubling its trajectory in a closed orbit, which, at the same time, causes space to bend over itself. The distance between two points is exactly that curvature space.

For this reason, Einstein said that you could not talk about time and space separately, you had to do it within the same concept. For example, an object with greater mass will always have greater gravity, and said mass, in addition to deforming space, also alters time.

Albert Einstein came to solve the equation created by Newton applying the Theory of Relativity, explaining why gravity caused the movement of the planets. Modern astronomers have almost unanimously accepted this view of celestial mechanics, assuming that if for Newton, gravity was the force that was generated between bodies, for Einstein, gravity is geometry.

Celestial relativistic mechanics was introduced, in addition to Einstein, by the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld and by the British physicist Banesh Hoffman. Years later it has been perfected in its details by Russian physicists Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock and Victor A. Brumberg, by the English M.H. Soffel and by the French physicist Thibault Damour.

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