"Death Dance" Stars Found - May Help Prove Einstein Right

Einstein has advanced many ideas. Most have been demonstrated/observed, but not all. There is still considerable debate about gravity waves.

Yes, Einstein was right even about things he thought he was wrong about, e.g. the cosmological constant.

You're clearly very passionate about this topic and I think that passion has blinded you a little as to just how important an article's title is. The actual article only says this:

"But astronomers hope that, before the collision, the spinning stars will help scientists test Einstein's general theory of relativity and even reveal the origins of an entire class of supernovae."

The title was undoubtedly written by some editor whose job is to drive traffic. Nothing to get so upset about. Most people are pretty ignorant about these sorts of things (myself included). That doesn't mean that I saw the title and was like "well finally they proved that mad man right."

Well, of course we expect the gravity waves to be there, given the other effects of relativity that have been confirmed so far.

However, scientists still observe, verify, measure. As one other poster mentioned, the equipment to detect gravity waves from afar has not yet been able to do the job (due to opportunity or sensitivity, don't know).

If for some reason they do not find the waves (and the instruments are shown to be good), then there will be some more deep thinking to do: were we really looking at objects different than what we thought? Is there some theory more twisted than relativity that needs to be made to explain the previous results as a special case and also explaining the new results???

Einstein's relativity is undoubtedly correct in its basic tenets. But there are some finer points which were or are still up for debate.

Frame dragging is one example. There were several theories offering slightly different predictions in that field (that broke down to perfect identity for real-life situations), Einstein's GR being just one of them.

So, in physics it's like this: trust, but verify.

> einstein was right. his work was an improvement on what went before.

Einstein is less wrong; his work has smaller error bars than what went before. It's "sufficiently right to allow advances to be made".

See http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html (by Isaac Asimov)

They aren't moving directly toward each other at that rate; they are orbiting each other at that rate, and very gradually moving closer.

I don't have any expertise in astrophysics (just physics), but I am pretty sure that white dwarfs aren't nearly strong enough to produce observable lensing. You need black holes or whole galaxies for that. Further, these stars are separated by less than the earth-moon distance, so they aren't individually resolvable. The fact that it is a binary system has been inferred from periodicities in it's brightness and spectrum. ("Astronomers measured the stars' relative motions by looking at the light signatures, or spectra, coming from the stars as they eclipse each other.")

I think your guess is right that all the data about the gravitational waves will be taken from the orbital decay. This is actually a decent amount of data since the rate of decay isn't constant, and because the eclipse maneuver isn't a smooth process.

They can (in theory) observe them using an observatory named LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. It's essentially lasers set up to shoot along long corridors such that any changes in the distance between the ends can be measured. Gravitational waves will change this distance, so the laser interferometer should be able to measure gravitational waves.

LIGO hasn't yet observed gravitational waves (it's currently being upgraded to "Advanced LIGO") but has set important upper limits on the strengths of gravitational waves. And importantly, it hasn't ruled them out.