1846 – Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams, studying Uranus' orbit, independently prove that another, farther planet must exist. Neptune was found at the predicted moment and position.
1855 – Le Verrier observes a 35 arcsecond per century excess precession of Mercury's orbit and attributes it to another planet, inside Mercury's orbit. The planet was never found. See Vulcan.
1876 – William Kingdon Clifford suggests that the motion of matter may be due to changes in the geometry of space.[24]
1882 – Simon Newcomb observes a 43 arcsecond per century excess precession of Mercury's orbit.
1884 – William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) lectures on the issues with the wave theory of light with regards to the luminiferous ether.[25]
1902 – Paul Gerber explains the movement of the perihelion of Mercury using finite speed of gravity.[30] His formula, at least approximately, matches the later model from Einstein's general relativity, but Gerber's theory was incorrect.
1906 – Max Planck coins the term Relativtheorie. Albert Einstein later uses the term Relativitätstheorie in a conversation with Paul Ehrenfest. He originally prefers calling it Invariance Theory.[39]
1911 – Max von Laue publishes the first textbook on special relativity.[51]
1911 – Albert Einstein explains the need to replace both special relativity and Newton's theory of gravity; he realizes that the principle of equivalence only holds locally, not globally.[52]
1916 – Karl Schwarzschild publishes the Schwarzschild metric about a month after Einstein published his general theory of relativity.[60][61] This was the first solution to the Einstein field equations other than the trivial flat space solution.[62][63][64]
1919 – Arthur Eddington leads a solar eclipse expedition which detects gravitational deflection of light by the Sun,[75] which, despite opinion to the contrary, survives modern scrutiny.[76] Other teams fail for reasons of war and politics.[77]
1953 – P. C. Vaidya Newtonian time in general relativity, Nature, 171, p260.
1954 – Suraj Gupta sketches how to derive the equations of general relativity from quantum field theory for a massless spin-2 particle (the graviton).[120] His procedure was later carried out by Stanley Deser in 1970.[121][122]
1955-56 – Robert Kraichnan shows that under the appropriate assumptions, Einstein's field equations of gravitation arise from the quantum field theory of a massless spin-2 particle coupled to the stress-energy tensor.[123][124] This follows from his unpublished work as an undergraduate in 1947.[122]
1960 – Thomas Matthews and Allan R. Sandage associate 3C 48 with a point-like optical image, show radio source can be at most 15 light minutes in diameter,
1963 – Maarten Schmidt and Jesse Greenstein discover quasi-stellar objects, later shown to be moving away from Earth due to the expansion of the Universe.[42]
1964 – Steven Weinberg shows that a quantum field theory of interacting massless spin-2 particles is Lorentz invariant only if it satisfies the principle of equivalence.[142][143][122]
1986 – Bernard Schutz shows that cosmic distances can be determined using sources of gravitational waves without references to the cosmic distance ladder.[213] Standard-siren astronomy is born.
1995 – John F. Donoghue show that general relativity is a quantum effective field theory.[221] This framework could be used to analyze binary systems observed by gravitational-wave observatories.[222]
2017 – LIGO-VIRGO collaboration detects gravitational waves emitted by a neutron-star binary, GW170817.[246] The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the International Gamma-ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) unambiguously detect the corresponding gamma-ray burst.[247][248] LIGO-VIRGO and Fermi constrain the difference between the speed of gravity and the speed of light in vacuum to 10−15.[249] This marks the first time electromagnetic and gravitational waves are detected from a single source,[250][251] and give direct evidence that some (short) gamma-ray bursts are due to colliding neutron stars.[246][247]
2017 – MICROSCOPE satellite experiment verifies the principle of equivalence to 10−15 in terms of the Eötvös ratio .[258] The final report is published in 2022.[259][260]
2017 – Scientists begin using gravitational-wave sources as "standard sirens" to measure the Hubble constant, finding its value to be broadly in line with the best estimates of the time.[262][263] Refinements of this technique will help resolve discrepancies between the different methods of measurements.[264]
2018 – Final paper by the Planck satellite collaboration.[265] Planck operated between 2009 and 2013.
2018 – Mihalis Dafermos and Jonathan Luk disprove the strong cosmic censorship hypothesis for the Cauchy horizon of a uncharged, rotating black hole.[266]
2018 – Advanced LIGO-VIRGO collaboration constrains equations of state for a neutron star using GW170817.[267][268]
2018 – Luciano Rezzolla, Elias R. Most, and Lukas R. Weih used gravitational-wave data from GW170817 constrain the possible maximum mass for a neutron star to around 2.17 solar masses.[269]
2018 – Kris Pardo, Maya Fishbach, Daniel Holz, and David Spergel limit the number of spacetime dimensions through which gravitational waves can propagate to 3 + 1, in line with general relativity and ruling out models that allow for "leakage" to higher dimensions of space.[270][271] Analyses of GW170817 have also ruled out many other alternatives to general relativity,[272][273][274][275] and proposals for dark energy.[276][277][278][279][280]
2018 – Two different experimental teams report highly precise values of Newton's gravitational constant that slightly disagree.[281][282][283]
2019 – Advanced LIGO and VIRGO detect GW190814, the collision of a 26-solar-mass black hole and a 2.6-solar-mass object, either an extremely heavy neutron star or a very light black hole.[287][288] This is the largest mass gap seen in a gravitational-wave source to-date.
2021 – Jun Ye and his team measure gravitational redshift with an accuracy of 7.6 × 10−21 using an ultracold cloud of 100,000 strontium atoms in an optical lattice.[291][292]
2021 – EHT measures the polarization of the ring of M87*,[293] and other properties of the magnetic field in its vicinity.[294]
2021 – EHT releases an image of Sagittarius A*, the central supermassive black hole of the Milky Way,[295][296] measures its shadow,[297] and shows that it is accurately described by the Kerr metric.[298][299]
2022 – JWST identifies several candidate high-redshift objects, corresponding to just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.[309][310]
2023 – James Nightingale and colleagues detect Abell 1201, an ultramassive black hole (33 billion solar masses), using strong gravitational lensing.[311]
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