Testing Einstein’s Work Using Observations of Fast Radio Bursts

Two recent papers use data from radio telescopes as a way of testing Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity

A depiction of the kind of radio telescopes used to record Fast Radio Bursts. Credit: Matt Bell (image).

Kaustubha Sen, in a paper published in November, has been testing Einstein’s theory using Fast Radio Bursts to see whether their behaviour fits with the weak equivalence principle. One way he and his team have proposed to do this is by using data to test a possible time lag of photons of different frequencies caused by the effect of a gravitational field which would violate the principle of weak equivalence (Sen et al., 2021). Einstein’s work proposes that such distortions of light travelling through space would not occur, as the weak equivalence principle dictates that motion of particles would be the same within twin reference frames of motion. Testing this principle using data from radio telescopes would help suggest whether remedies are needed on Einstein’s original theory of General Relativity. As photons in Fast Radio Bursts have travelled such great distances, they present an opportunity to test for effects that would remain undetectable in light that had travelled from closer to us like in our galaxy.

Fast Radio Bursts are astronomic phenomena discovered very recently. Astronomers detected them for the first time in 2007…