Gravity is everywhere it gives shape to the things you see around you
holds you to the earth and keeps the planets and satellites in orbit considered to be one of
the most complex and mystifying forces of nature gravity has been a source of debate and numerous
conspiracy theories for years ever since it was first discovered now a team of researchers has
come out with some new studies that claim to have uncovered the real source of gravity and
which could fundamentally change everything we thought we knew about the world around us and
how it actually functions welcome to Factnomenal and in today's video we'll be taking a closer look
at what could potentially be the answer to one of the world's most mysterious forces gravity
You've heard this story before a young Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree gets hit on
the head by a falling apple and this sparks a eureka moment for the young man which as we all
know prompted him to ask perhaps one of the most important questions ever to be asked why did the
apple fall straight to the ground rather than go sideways or upwards although there's much debate
to this day if there was an apple that really did fall on his head the point is he noticed
something and that something would prove to be one of the most important observations in physics
several ancient Greek and Indian philosophers had also observed that objects naturally move
towards the ground but it took a flash of insight from newton to bring this truth to
light the average person probably wouldn't think twice seeing a fruit fall from its tree but
sir newton being the curious complex character that he was found this rather odd and thankfully
he did because it's this very simple yet fundamental question that led him to lay
down the fundamental law of gravity and that was just the beginning but what exactly is gravity
the textbook definition of gravity reads the force that attracts a body towards the center of the
Earth or towards any other physical body having mass but gravity is so much more complex and it
truly is not easy to contain it within a single definition we can understand gravity in our daily
lives as the fundamental force that dominates each and every moment of our life probably without us
even taking a moment to realize it whether that's giving our muscles something to struggle against
the pressure we feel when we climb up a hill or slope or simply the heavy force that pulls us
right back down to the ground when we jump in the air in terms of space gravity is very important
we know it is the force that actually holds all the planets and celestial bodies in orbit around
the Sun merges different galaxies together or simply collapses hydrogen clouds into stars
according to newton he outlined his law of gravity in 1687 in his book philosophy naturalis principia
mathematica or simply translated to mathematical principles of natural philosophy german physicist
johannes kepler almost a century prior had already developed three laws governing the motion of
the five then known planets the law of orbits the law of equal areas and the law of periods
however the problem here was that he didn't have any theoretical model for the principles that were
governing this movement and relied more on trial and error for the course of his studies but
newton was able to take the laws of motion he'd developed and applied them to planetary motion
in order to develop a very rigorous mathematical framework for this planetary motion in his book he
came to the conclusion that the apple and the moon were both being influenced by the same force he
named this force gravitation from the latin word gravitas meaning weight or heaviness he officially
defined the law of universal gravitation as every particle attracts other particles in the universe
with a force that's directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional
to the square of the distance between their centers newton compared the acceleration of
the moon to the acceleration of the apple or other objects on the earth through his calculations and
models he was able to lay down the three most fundamental laws which today we know
as newton's laws of motion first an object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it
the second law states that the force of an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration and
lastly the third law states that when two objects interact they apply certain force to each other
in equal magnitude and in the opposite direction newton's law of universal gravitation goes beyond
the objects and things that we see on earth and extends gravity into space more than anything
people often attribute the fact that newton didn't necessarily discover gravity but rather
he discovered the important fact that gravity is universal and all objects are attracted to each
other with a force of gravitational attraction newton's law of universal gravitation is a widely
accepted theory so much so that it's taken as a fact not just a theory but with the passage
of time it would soon become clear that his description of things may be fraying at the edges
although Newton was able to establish that gravity is universal he wasn't quite able to get
some important questions answered there was yet a lot to learn about gravity and more importantly
how exactly does it work then in 1915 Albert Einstein rose to the challenge
he came up with a theory that completely changes science's perception of gravity expanding on his
theory of special relativity which he published 10 years prior Einstein argued that space and
time are inextricably connected however the theory hadn't quite taken into consideration
the existence of gravity in the special relativity theory he determined that the laws of physics are
the same for all the non-accelerating observers and that the speed of light within a vacuum is
the same regardless of the speed at which an observer travels he concluded that space and
time were interwoven into a single continuum known as space-time and that while events may
occur at the same time for one observer they could occur at a completely different time for another
after much study he found through his equations for the general relativity theory that massive
objects seem to cause a distortion in space-time so in newton's gravity only an object's motion
through space is affected by the gravitational force whereas according to Einstein's general
relativity both space and time are distorted by the presence of mass Newton's theory was
extremely simple but couldn't quite explain Mercury's peculiar orbit around the sun
where the planet's orbit shifted much faster than Newton predicted there had to be something missing
and this is where Einstein's theory was able to offer a different view in order to make sense of
what exactly was going on with the first planet in our solar system and the closest to the sun
he reasoned that each object curves the fabric of space and time around the forming
of a sort of well that other objects or even beams of light could fall into
take a simple example of the sun as a bowling ball placed on a mattress with its mass it created a
depression that then drew the planets closer to itself his theory went on to be confirmed by more
than a century of experimentation and specifically the 1919 solar eclipse in which the path of light
from the distant stars actually got shifted by the sun's intense gravitation and it shifted
exactly by the amount Einstein had predicted the question arises then did Einstein prove Newton and
his theory of gravity wrong not at all newton's work was rather descriptive and used a simple
mathematical equation for what was observed whereas the issues surrounding his theory
were the very reason Einstein was able to dig deeper in support of his own theory
as of today Einstein's theory of general relativity is arguably the most successful theory
of all time the predictions of general relativity have never once failed but that doesn't mean there
hasn't been some concern and debate over the past few decades as with any theory out there
but if there is one thing that perhaps Albert Einstein couldn't explain is black holes well
at least not entirely all the predictions of his theory are usually the result of a very simplified
version of his equations but soon it was realized that some aging stars would not be able to resist
the pull of gravity and would collapse in on themselves and form what we know of as a black
hole a team of scientists believe that the massive celestial structures might just be the exception
that the theory of general relativity may not be able to explain there in the inky depths of the
black hole the laws of the universe seem to fold in on themselves and these models of gravity may
not hold very true first Einstein sought to debunk some of the things put forth by newton and now
scientists may be on to something new according to the study that was published in the journal
science it shows that gravity works just as Einstein had predicted even right to the very edge
of the black hole in this case we take sagittarius a star a super massive black hole that's sitting
right at the center of our Milky Way galaxy study co-author Jessica Lu astrophysicist
at University of California Berkeley states that "we now have the technological capacity to
test gravitational theories in ways that we've never been able to do before" Einstein's theory of
gravity is definitely in our crosshairs co-leader of the new research Andrea Ghez stated that
while newton may have had a great time with his description of gravity at some point it became
clear that it had many gray areas and Einstein offered a more complete version of what gravity is
and how it works she states that with the advance in technology and new testing capabilities it's
quite possible that we may very well be close to finding something a little more comprehensive
that would allow us to describe and truly understand gravity in the context of black holes
while Isaac Newton had a rather simplified view of gravity and was able to put forth the basics
there was still that gap where it wasn't quite sure of things like Mercury's orbit
afterwards Einstein came in and made sense of what exactly was happening with Mercury
but now guess and her team wanted to truly subject Einstein's theory to a much more rigorous test
they observed what happened when light from the star SO 2 passed Sagittarius A star which
just so happens to be 4 million times more massive than our sun they used a trio of giant telescopes
in Hawaii in order to watch the bluish star make its closest approach to sagittarius a star in
its 16-year orbit around the gigantic black hole so if Einstein was right the black holes should
warp space and time in a way that would extend the wavelength of the light from SO 2 the waves would
stretch out as the intense gravity coming from the black hole drained their energy thus causing the
star's light to shine from blue to red in the experiment there were three possible outcomes
either it proved Einstein right and turned red the way it should or second it could continue
to flow blue and would actually give credence to newton's model of gravity which actually doesn't
account for the curvature of space and time or it could turn a completely different color
and leave us all with a completely new model of gravity altogether but as the experiment went on
what do you know it turned red so Einstein's theory still continued to hold true what did
the team have to say about this letdown Ghez had a rather optimistic view when she stated that it
didn't matter but that the simple fact that the team was able to look in a place that hadn't been
done before and explore a regime that hadn't been explored before was a big step forward in itself
despite the team not finding anything conclusive to debunk Einstein's theory or prove that it has
any flaws for now scientists know that at some point of time within the black hole
Einstein's theory of relativity will stop working Nobel Prize winning physicist Kip Thorne said
the curvature of space-time is so extreme that Einstein's general relativity fails we yet don't
understand how it works when the thing that you're dealing with is extreme the team is rather looking
forward to what they have to achieve within the next decade the experiment no doubt pushed
the envelope and brought them one step closer to perhaps discovering a whole new aspect to gravity
which we perhaps have been overlooking this entire time or simply haven't been able to study yet
the research team plans to use a new generation of high-powered instruments that would allow
them to conduct many more tests of gravity around black holes they'll continue to keep a watchful
eye over SO 2 to see if it's orbit precessed as Einstein would have predicted or expected it to do
and if it doesn't then voila they'll have found the next big thing in physics the team states that
within the next 10 years or so they're looking to push the theory of gravity to its limits in
every way and on every object possible to hopefully start to see some cracks
on the other hand new arc supported research has confirmed that Einstein's theory of gravity
accurately describes current observations of black holes right from the smallest to the largest
by observing the shadows of supermassive black holes residing in the centers of galaxies
and gravitational waves which are the ripples in the fabric of our universe from colliding stellar
mass black holes the general relativity theory can be tested to its extreme scientists from the ark
center of excellence for gravitational wave discovery the event horizon telescope and the
LIGO scientific collaboration have come together to outline a consistent approach to exploring any
deviations from the general relativity theory and have found no evidence for deviations
so far the EHT generated images of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 that's
several billion times the mass of our sun the LIGO and virgo gravitational wave observatories have
been using gravitational waves from the merging of stellar mass black holes the combination of these
measurements was used to test theory and sure enough there weren't any deviations to be found
so what does all this mean for us well frankly not much if we jump we're still probably going
to get pulled back to earth and land on our feet due to gravity but what a discovery like
that could potentially mean is we could get much closer to understanding how our universe was born
and how we got to where we are today not to mention it would help to understand and
track gravitational waves far better whether or not the team succeeds in their endeavors
to uncover more about gravity its origins and how it affects black holes only time will tell
one thing is for certain gravity is undoubtedly one of the strongest and most complex forces of
nature and the more we try to learn about gravity and uncover its secrets the weirder it gets
that's all for today folks so what do you think do you have any theories about gravity
let us know in the comments and please don't forget to smash that like button and subscribe
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