Lense Thirring effect verified

NASA reports:

As World Turns it Drags Time and Space

10.21.04

An international team of NASA and university researchers has dramatically improved the accuracy of the first direct evidence that the Earth drags space and time around itself as it rotates. The measurements used the latest gravity models obtained from NASA's GRACE mission.


The research, reported in the journal Nature, is the most accurate direct measurement to date of the Lense-Thirring Effect--a bizarre effect of general relativity, which predicts a rotating mass will drag space around it. The Lense-Thirring Effect is also known as frame dragging.

Frame dragging is like what happens if a bowling ball spins in a thick fluid such as molasses. As the ball spins, it pulls the molasses around itself. Anything stuck in the molasses will also move around the ball. Similarly, as the Earth rotates, it pulls space-time in its vicinity around itself. This will shift the orbits of satellites near Earth.

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/earth_drag.html


------

An important early prediction of Einstein's general relativity was the advance of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit, whose measurement provided one of the classical tests of Einstein's theory. The advance of the orbital point-of-closest-approach also applies to a binary pulsar system and to an Earth-orbiting satellite. General relativity also predicts that the rotation of a body like Earth will drag the local inertial frames of reference around it, which will affect the orbit of a satellite. This Lense–Thirring effect has hitherto not been detected with high accuracy, but its detection with an error of about 1 per cent is the main goal of Gravity Probe B—an ongoing space mission using orbiting gyroscopes.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7011/full/nature03007.html

------

If you think that is cool, how about the exciting (in my opinion) field of Gravitoelectromagnetism, abbreviated GEM. It refers to a set of formal analogies between the equations for electromagnetism and relativistic gravitation ; specifically: between Maxwell's field equations and an approximation, valid under certain conditions, to theEinstein field equations for general relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitomagnetism

I strongly suspect that electromagnetism is a local form of gravity. I believe that it is gravity that drives and supplies the energy and principles behind electromagnetism. I believe, as Roy Masters says in Gravity Driven Universe that gravity is the strongest force in the physical realm. The surprisingly strong, charming and useful properties of magnetism and electricity are local and concentrated effects of the mother gravity field.