General Relativeity II Effects

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How Fast Is It – General Relativity II - Effects

General Relativity II – Effects

{Abstract: In this segment of the “How Fast Is It” video book, we cover the effects of general relativity and how they
differ from what Newton’s gravity predicts. Our first effect is the orbit of Mercury that precesses more than Newtonian
gravity predicts. To understand the non-Euclidian space that Mercury orbits in, we introduce the Schwarzschild metric
and compare it to the Minkowski metric for flat space-time. We illustrate the positive curvature around the Sun using
concentric circles with shrinking circumferences. We then show how this slight difference in curvature produces
additional movement in the precessing perihelion of Mercury’s orbit that exactly fits the measured number. Our next
effect is the bending of light. We cover Arthur Eddington’s famous measurement during a total eclipse of the Sun and show
how the amount of starlight bending matched Einstein’s calculations better than Newton’s. We extend this bending effect to show
how Einstein Rings and gravitational lensing work. And we show how this effect tips over light cones and changes world-lines.
Our third effect is gravitational time dilation. We show how it works and cover how our GPS uses it. We also cover the Pound-
Rebka experiment used the Mossbauer Effect to showed how this time dilation impacts gravitational redshift. We also illustrate
how this effect resolves the Twin Paradox we introduced in the Special Relativity segment. Our final implication involves frame-
dragging. To understand this effect, we introduce the Kerr Metric that covers rotating energy densities that literally drag space
along with them. We use Gravity Probe B to illustrate how it works and how it is measured. We finish with an in depth look at
the black hole in the movie Interstellar.}

Introduction

With GR we now have a theory of gravity quite different than Newton’s. But is this a difference
without a difference? Or does GR predict different physical phenomena than Newton’s theory?

If you’ve seen the “How small is it” video book on quantum mechanics and the standard model, you
may have noticed that much of the theory was developed to explain experimental evidence. In GR,
we find that the theory was developed without much experimental evidence.

But the arrival of the theory, put experimental physics to work to prove or disprove it. Einstein
himself showed that the field equations predict the orbit of Mercury better than Newton’s. He also
proposed two additional tests: one was the bending of light around the Sun, and the second was
gravitational redshift.

We’ll go into each of these plus one more on the twisting of space around rotating masses. We’ll
finish with a close look at how this all comes together around black holes.

[Music : Mozart - Flute Concerto No 2 - Composed in the spring or summer of


1777 as an Oboe concerto.]

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Orbit of Mercury

[When working with GR, it is easiest to use


polar coordinates because we are always
dealing with the structure of space-time some
distance away from a large mass.]

In 1916, the same year that Einstein published his GR paper, Karl Schwarzschild published his exact
solution for space around a large non-rotating mass. His metric is now called the Schwarzschild
metric and it works quite well for slowly rotating masses like the Earth and Sun and planets in our
solar system. We’ll use this metric for the first 3 tests.

This metric shows that we exist in a gently positively curved world.

Let’s take a look at what our


space-time curvature looks
like with this metric. If we
draw the circumference of
the Earth’s orbit, we get a
length that is 2 π times our
distance from the sun.

If we exited in flat
Euclidean space, we would
calculate the circumference
of an orbit one km closer to
the sun and see that the
distance between the orbits
is one km.

But because of our positive curvature, if we were to measure the circumference with a radius that is
1 km shorter than the first, we’d find that it is less than 2 π times the shorter radius.

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Which means that the


distance between the
circumferences would be
greater than the 1 km
difference in the radii! But
only a little.

We can repeat this process


all the way to the surface of
the sun. With each
successive radius, the
difference between the
orbits would increasingly
diverge from the Euclidian
numbers.
If we were to telescope this picture, you’d see the standard diagrams that are used to help explain
GR. But diagrams like this are misleading in two ways. First, they represent an external curvature
into another dimension, when in fact, we are talking about intrinsic curvature.
There is no evidence for the
existence of a fourth special
dimension. Second, it looks
like you need a downward
force on the object to get it
to drop into the hole. That
would be gravity – but
that’s what the lines were
supposed to represent. So
we’ll avoid using this
technique.

For over half a century before Einstein's time, it was known that there was something odd about the
orbit of Mercury.

The elliptical path it carves


around the sun shifts with
each orbit, leaving its
perihelion, or closest point
to the sun, 56 arcseconds
forward on each pass.

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Newtonian equations accounted for all but


around half an arc-second per year. And of
course, they couldn’t take into consideration
the effects of curved space, because the idea
that space wasn’t flat hadn’t been considered
yet. With Schwarzschild’s metric, Einstein
came out with the exact number to cover the
mysterious half an arc-sec.

He had passed the first test of his new theory.

Bending of light
When light comes close to the Sun, the sun’s gravity bends it inward. This makes the star look like
it’s further away from the sun in the sky than it really is. Both Einstein’s and Newton’s gravitation
theories predicted this.

But the theories predict different values for


the amount light would bend. Einstein’s
number was almost twice Newton’s. Einstein
suggested that a solar eclipse could be used to
find the exact number.

In 1919, a solar eclipse was slated to occur


with the sun silhouetted against the Hyades
star cluster - the nearest open cluster to our
Solar System. Here’s the Hyades star
configuration with some of the brightest starts
identified.

The British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington took up positions off the coast of Africa and in Brazil,
and simultaneously measured the clusters light as it brushed past the sun.

The images were then superimposed on top


of an image taken at night earlier in the year.
When the eclipse and night images were
compared, a gap was found. And when the
gap was measured, it confirmed that
Einstein’s prediction was right.

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Here’s one of Eddington's photographs. The


lines highlight the Hyades stars used to
calculate the shift.

Gravitational Lensing

[Music : David Arkenstone - Rob and Mary. From the movie Rob Roy.]

This same light bending leads to the warping of light from distant galaxies as the light encounters
super-massive galaxies on their path to us. This is called gravitational lensing. [Einstein predicted
that we would see ‘rings’ now called Einstein rings.

These rings are produced when two galaxies


are almost perfectly aligned, one behind the
other, giving an image like this with a reddish-
white elliptical galaxy in the foreground and a
thin ring of blue surrounding it — which is in
fact the distorted light from another galaxy
twice as far away. That would put it at 5.7
billion light years away.]
Here’s a clip that shows how this lensing works on a grand scale. A distant galaxy would be seen
here on Earth directly if there were no intervening massive cluster to bend its light. But with such a
cluster, the light from the distant galaxy gets bent into rings and arches that continue on to Earth.

This is Abell 1689 [2.2 billion light years


away]. It’s one of the most massive galaxy
clusters known. The gravity of its trillion stars,
plus dark matter, acts like a 2-million-light-
year-wide "lens" in space.

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And here’s MACS J0416.1–2403 5.47 billion light years away. It’s the latest from Hubble on
gravitational lensing released in late 2015. These foreground galaxy clusters are magnifying the light
from the faint galaxies that lie far behind the clusters themselves. These faint lensed galaxies are
around 12 billion lightyears away. It’s the gravitational lensing that allows us to see that far back in
time. Without the magnification, these galaxies would be invisible for us.

Light-cone tipping

One of the key implications for the bending


of light is its impact on what’s physically
possible in heavily curved space-time. Here’s a
two dimensional slice of the future light-cone
that we developed in the previous segment on
SR.

This purple line represents a path taken by


anything with mass. It’s called the world-line
and can be anywhere inside the light-cone. In
this representation, world-lines have to remain
between the two arms of the light cone
because nothing can travel faster than the
speed of light.

The speed of light lines are the divider


between events that are in your future (if it’s
your light cone) and events that are not. By
“in your future” I mean that you can be
connected to them physically in some way.

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Now suppose there is a great mass-energy


density to the left of the cone. The light
would be bent in its direction.

We see that points that were impossible to


reach before, now fall inside the cone and are
reachable. And we see that points that were
reachable inside the cone now fall outside the
cone and are unreachable.

This is light-cone tipping. The closer we get to the source of the gravity, the greater the space-time
curvature. And the larger the matter curving the space, the greater the curvature. We’ll take another
look at this when we get to black holes.

Gravitational Time Dilation

[Music : Grieg - Holberg Suite, Sarabande (Andante). Based on eighteenth century


dance forms, this was written in 1884 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Danish
Norwegian humanist playwright Ludvig Holberg.]

One of the most dramatic consequences of GR is how space-time curvature effects the flow of time.
We’ll use the elevator thought experiment to illustrate
how clocks run at different rates in the box according to their
distance from the source of the gravity. We’ll see that a clock
closer to the source of the gravitational field runs slower than a
clock further away.

To help see how this works, we’ll take another


look at the lightning strike for the person on
the train, and the person on the ground that
we used in our segment on SR. Only this time,
we’ll map the events to our space-time graph.
The world-line for the person standing on the
ground is shown in purple.

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We label the lightning strikes A and B, and


place the two events on the space-time graph
with A to the left of the person on the ground
and B to the right. The plan containing A and
B contains all the points that are simultaneous
for the person on the ground at the time of
the two strikes. We call this the simultaneity
plan.

The light from both events travels at the


speed of light so their world-line always
moves at a 45 degree angle. They reach the
person on the ground at the same time. This
of course is what makes them simultaneous
from the point of view of the person on the
ground.

Now let’s repeat the lightning strikes so that, from the point of view of the person on the moving
train, they strike at the same time.

In order for the light to reach the person on


the train at the same time, the strike behind
him will need to hit first from the person on
the ground’s point of view, because it will
have to travel further to get to the moving
person than the light from the strike that hits
in front of him.

So we see that the


Simultaneity plan,
for the moving
person, is
necessarily tilted up
on the right.

Now we can map the movements of A and B in the accelerating elevator to the space-time graph.
The center is the source of the acceleration (aka gravity). A is to the right of it and B is a bit further
to the right reflecting their distances from the source of the gravity. As the elevator accelerates, the

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world-lines on the space-time graph are not straight lines. They curve outwards because their
velocity increases with every second.

[Music : Korsakov - Capriccio Espagnol. Written in 1887, this is an orchestral


suite, based on Spanish folk melodies.]

Here we have clocks that measure the proper


time elapsed along each person's world-line.
They mark the time in their own reference
frame. At the start, they were both at rest, so
their simultaneity plan is horizontal and they
see each other’s clocks reading zero.

In this example, we see that after 2 seconds,


we have a slightly tilted simultaneity plan. B
sees that ‘at the same time’ his clock ticks 2,
A’s clock ticks 1. ‘A’ also sees his own clock
reading 1 when B’s clock reads 2.

Continuing to a higher velocity, with the


steeper slope for the simultaneity plan, B sees
A’s clock reading 2 when his own clock reads
4 seconds. ‘A’ also sees his own clock reading
2 when B’s clock reads 4.

A and B both agree that A’s clock is ticking slower than B’s clock. [We are skipping the SR effects
of time dilation and space contraction here. They play a big role as the velocities approach the speed

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of light.] The equivalence principle tells us that the same thing will happen near a massive body.
Gravity slows down time. Newton’s gravitation has no such implication.

We see this with our GPS systems. In our segment on SR, we saw that time dilation due to velocity
differences have GPS satellites losing every day. Time that must be corrected for to get the right
positions on the surface of the Earth.

They must also take into account gravitational time dilation due to their being further away from the
Earth than clocks on the ground. Based on the Schwarzschild metric, calculations show that the
satellites' clocks will gain over 45,000 nanoseconds a day due to this general relativity effect. The
accuracy of our GPS system is strong evidence for the correctness of the GTR. [So the total
relativity effect is the difference between the two (45850 – 7214) of 38636 ns per day.]

Gravitational Redshift Experiment

In 1959, physicists Robert Pound and Glen Rebka preformed an experiment in the Jefferson
Physical Lab at Harvard to demonstrate gravitational redshift. It was based on physicist
Rudolph Mossbauer’s effect discovered two years earlier that involves the emission and absorption
of gamma rays from the excited states of an iron nucleus.

Here we have an iron atom’s nucleus in an excited state. When it falls to a lower energy level, a
gamma ray photon carrying the energy is emitted. Once this photon encounters a like atom, it will
be absorbed – raising the energy level of the encountered atom’s nucleus.

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The problem is that when the gamma ray is ejected, the nucleus recoils. Because of energy
momentum conservation, the recoil energy reduces the energy of the gamma ray. The gamma ray is
no longer a match for the other nucleus and it moves right through. There is no absorption.

What Mossbauer discovered was that if he imbeds the atoms in a crystal, the recoil is reduced
dramatically, and absorption can be established.

Pound and Rebka use this Mossbauer Effect. They placed an


emitter at the bottom of a tower in the Laboratory and installed
a detector 22.6 meters above. No absorption was detected
because gravitational time dilation changed the frequency of the
emitted gamma rays so no energy match existed in the detector.

The calculated shift was extremely small, but


the Mossbauer Effect is sensitive enough to
measure it.

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the value predicted by Einstein’s field


They then adjusted the detector’s velocity equations using Schwarzschild’s metric.
down until absorption occurred. We get the
amount the frequency changed using the well
understood relativistic Doppler redshift
equation just like the Doppler shift in
starlight. Their results came to within 1.6% of

Although this experiment did not produce


new results, it showed that gravitational time
dilation, one of GR’s most significant
findings, was consistent with all physical
conservation laws. This gave the GTR 3
successes out of 3 tests.

Twin Paradox Resolved

Gravitational time dilation is the answer to the


Twin Paradox that we covered in the previous
segment on SR. The key interval is at the half-
way point. As the spaceship approaches Vega
it decelerates to a stop and then re-accelerates
back to Earth. The traveling twin finds that
she is in a gravitational field.

Let’s say her acceleration is 10 g’s or 98 m/s2.


At this rate it will take her 35 days to
decelerate to 0 and another 35 days to
reaccelerate back to 99% of the speed of light.
Gravitational time dilation shows that as her
clock ticks 70 days, her twin’s clock on Earth
will have ticked 18,134 days. That’s 48 years.
The twin on Earth agrees.

So instead of both twins thinking the other should be younger, they both agree that the twin on the
rocket to Vega and back is younger. No contradiction is involved and the paradox is resolved.

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Frame Dragging
[Music : Heuberger - Midnight Bells: from the operetta Der Opernball written in
1898.]

Our last test is the most recent. It was designed to measure the twisting of space around a rotating
mass. This twisting is called frame-dragging, where space is literally dragged along with the rotating
mass. The effect was derived in 1918 by physicists Josef Lense and Hans Thirring, and is also known
as the Lense–Thirring effect.
They predicted that the rotation of a massive object would
distort the space-time metric, making the orbit of a nearby test
particle precess like a gyroscope. This does not happen
with Newtonian gravity where the gravitational field of a body
depends only on its mass, not on its rotation.

Up till now, we’ve been using the


Schwarzschild metric which does not show
this effect. It wasn’t until 1963 that a
mathematician named Roy Kerr discovered
the significantly more complicated metric for
rotating bodies that made it possible to
calculate the precession one can expect from a
given mass and rotation of an object like the
Earth.

To test this effect, NASA developed a satellite


called Gravity Probe B and put it into orbit
642 km above the Earth in 2004 where it
operated for a year.

It used a set of super sensitive gyroscopes to


measure precession due to frame-dragging. It
also included a non-gravitational drag
identification gyro and compensation micro
thrusters to maintain a non-gravitational drag
free environment. It compensated for solar
radiation drag and atmospheric disturbances
drag.

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By 2011, data analysis had confirmed that frame-dragging did occur and measured it to within 15%
of the amount predicted by the Kerr metric for Einstein’s field equations.

Anatomy of a Black Hole


[Music : Franz Liszt - Les Préludes - Symphonic Poem No3: published in
1856, it is the earliest example of an orchestral work entitled "symphonic poem".]

One of the most interesting consequences of GR is the structure and impact of a Black Hole.

In the Milky Way segment of the How Far


Away Is It video book, we discussed how they
are formed from collapsing massive stars, too
big for neutron pressure to halt their collapse
to a point, called a singularity.

The Schwarzschild metric showed that if the


mass of the body should contract to a small
enough radius, it would capture light itself. It
would go dark – hence the name Black Hole.
This radius is known as the Schwarzschild
radius and forms a sphere known as the event
horizon.

One of the best illustrations of a black hole was created for the 2015 movie “Interstellar” with the
help of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. This black hole, called Gargantua, was given a mass of 100
million suns and a super high rotation rate of 99.8 percent of the speed of light. With this kind of
rotation, we see that Gargantua is a Kerr black hole.

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At 100 million solar masses, the


Schwarzschild radius is around the distance
from the Sun to the Earth. That’s far enough
away to makes the tidal forces at the horizon
quite unnoticeable. We’ll use Gargantua to
illustrate the properties of GR that we have
discussed in this segment.

So let’s build this black hole from the ground


up. We are viewing it from the equatorial
plane and the object is rotating in on the left
an out on the right. Its center is dark out to
the Schwarzschild radius.

The Kerr metric shows that light can also be captured in stable orbits outside the event horizon. For
a rapidly rotating black hole, the orbital volume around the black hole would be significant. This
would produce a photon sphere shell incasing the black hole with light from all the stars in the
universe accumulated over the entire age of the universe. It would be a sight to see. But given that
the light is trapped in orbit, we can only see what leaks out.
This thin ring around the black hole
represents the cross section of this shell we’d
see because of light that leaks out in our
direction. It is flattened on the left because
light rotating with the Black Hole’s rotation
can get closer to the horizon than light
rotating against the black holes’ rotation.

Next, we see a dense sprinkling of stars with a


pattern of concentric shells. This is the
pattern produced by the gravitational lensing.

Further out we see the dislocation of star


positions due to the bending of light by the
gravity of the black hole.

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Disks and jets


This black hole has the remnants of an accretion disk that is no longer feeding the black hole.
[Instead of being a hundred million degrees like a typical black hole’s disk, this disk is only a few
thousand degrees, like the Sun’s surface.]

If the disk were not gravitational lensed, the black hole would have looked like this.

But, because of gravitationally lensing, the massive amount of light rays emitted from the disk’s top
face travel up and over the black hole, and light rays emitted from the disk’s bottom face travel
down and under the black hole. This combination gives us the full image of how the black hole
would actually look.

Black Hole Time Dilation


In the movie, one hour on Miller’s plant equaled 7 years on Earth. Some of this came from time
dilation due to the planet’s speed. It’s traveling at 55% of the speed of light in order to maintain its

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orbit. But the bulk of the time comes from gravitational time dilation. And the fact that Gargantua’s
rotational energy is so large, intensifies time dilation considerably.

If you watch the movie again, you might note


that it is the Kerr metric on the professor’s
blackboard.

Entering a Black hole


We can use tipping light cones to show how
all objects, unfortunate enough to cross the
event horizon, are captured forever. Here’s a
light cone far from the black hole. The
horizontal axis represents distance from the
singularity.

As we saw earlier, when space-time is curved by the presence of mass-energy, the light cone
structure gets distorted. When the mass is a black hole, the tilting reaches 450 at the event horizon.

This means that all events beyond the horizon


are no longer in the future light cone of any
object that has gone past it. No possible
world line gets you out. All remaining world
lines lead to the singularity.

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[It is interesting to note that as you cross the


horizon, the time term goes from negative
(which is time-like) to positive (which is
space-like). Simultaneously, the space terms all
go from positive (space-like) to negative
(time-like).] Distance from the singularity
decreases inside the black hole’s horizon as
surely as time increases outside the horizon.

In “Interstellar”, Cooper flies his ship into the black hole while Brand watches from a higher orbit.
We can use our space-time diagram along with light cone bending again to illustrate what each of
them would have seen.
First we’ll take a look at it from Cooper’s point of view. As he
heads directly into Gargantua he sees periodic signals from
Brand. She is far enough away from the horizon for her light
signals to all travel in a parallel manner at 45 degrees along her
light cone boundary. Cooper crosses the event horizon without
even noticing it, as signals continue to arrive at regular intervals.
Eventually he will feel the tidal forces of the singularity.

Now things are quite different from Brand’s point of view. As


Cooper approaches the event horizon, his light cone tips
towards the singularity. This means that his light signals back to
Brand are taking longer with each km traveled. The effect is
hyperbolic and the light signal he sends from the horizon itself
will never get to Brand. She sees his clock slowing down to the
point that it stops. She never ‘sees’ him enter the black hole!

What’s more, because of gravitational redshift, the image of Cooper and his ship shift to the red. At
the horizon, it has shifted into the infrared and can no longer be seen by Brand. For her, Cooper
grinds to a halt and goes invisible. Quite different from what Cooper sees.

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Conclusion

The GTR is now 100 years old. In spite of the fact that there have been a number of tests, questions
remain. One of the theories most interesting predictions is gravitational waves. But as yet, no
gravitational waves have been found. If they are ever found, would there be an associated
elementary boson particle (the graviton) like photons for the electromagnetic force? A great deal of
active research is under way to find out. The fate of GR remains in the hands of experimental
physicists.

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