Astronomy Night - The Day the Universe Changed

Join Antony Gomez, President of the Wellington Astronomical Society, to learn about the day the universe changed!

A hundred years ago, observations made of a Solar Eclipse on the 29 May 1919 changed the way we looked at the Universe. It provided the first observational proof of a new theory of gravity and made Einstein a household name.

This theory, called General Relativity (GR), solved the anomalous precession in the orbit of Mercury, predicted the bending, stretching of light and the slowing down of time around massive objects. It led to the prediction of black holes and we saw the first ever image of a supermassive black hole in April this year.

GR predicted the compressing and expanding of space and time in traveling waves which again were detected for the first time in 2015 from a merger of two black holes, which normally we would not be able to see, opening a new era in Astronomy.