Astronomers combined data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope which shows that this galaxy works as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, ratifying the theory's validity on galactic scales.
In 1915 Albert Einstein proposed his general theory of relativity (GR) to explain how gravity works. Since then GR has passed a series of high precision tests within the solar system, but there have been no precise tests of GR on large astronomical scales. A team of astronomers at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, used a nearby galaxy as a gravitational lens to make a precise test of gravity on astronomical length scales. The research is published today in the journal Science. The work was funded by the University of Portsmouth and the UK Science and Technologies Funding Council.