Eclipsing Sun Reveals Hidden Stars: The Modern Eddington Experiment

Solar eclipsePhoto byJongsun LeeonUnsplash

During the imminent solar eclipse, scientists in upstate New York are planning to re-create an experiment that proves Einstein's theory of relativity. According to Dr. Charles Martin, (who is a senior lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), they will be able to see stars in space that should be hidden behind the sun, during the eclipse, where otherwise the sun's brightness would otherwise obscure them.

Called the Eddington Experiment, it is based on the relativity theory that mass warps space time, so the light from distant stars is curved when it reaches our sun, and so can be seen during a solar eclipse.

StarsPhoto byNASAonUnsplash

A detailed description of the concept and past experiments that started at the turn of the century are described in more mathematical and historic detail this scientific abstract. Modern computers and electronic cameras have changed the precision of measurement radically.

The creation of a Modern Eddington Experiment Lab Manual and computer software for station control during data collection and post eclipse data processing is essential to meet this secondary goal.

The experiment is affordable for students of physics and astronomy.

It is important to have such an experiment for undergraduates because General Relativity and the curvature of space takes such an important and popular place in physics and astronomy today. Other experiments to involve students in GR are complicated and involve expensive equipment that most schools do not have.

Despited decades of performing the experiment, there were only two successful measurements of the stellar deflection phenomenon. Once in 1976 and one in 2017. "Neither of these measurements obtained enough stars to establish the inverse power law relationship of the stellar deflections, so this remains a crucial point to be verified, more than a century after the establishment of the theory."