First results from Microscope satellite confirm Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity with unprecedented precision

Published on 04/12/2017

Measurements of the equivalence principle had not been improved upon for 10 years, but now the first results from CNES’s Microscope satellite, equipped with accelerometers supplied by the French aerospace research agency ONERA, are 10 times better. They show, with an unprecedented precision of 2.10-14, that bodies in a vacuum fall with the same acceleration. The equivalence principle has so far proved unshakeable and this result simply reconfirms the theory of general relativity postulated by Albert Einstein over a century ago.

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