Advancing the LARES-2 mission and Einstein’s predictions
Professor Gurzadyan, who serves as the head of the Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics at the A.I. Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory in Yerevan, played a critical role in the analysis of data collected by the LARES-2 satellite. Launched in 2022, the satellite was designed with an optimized orbit and a high-uniformity retroreflector distribution to minimize external interference. By integrating these findings with historical data from the LAGEOS and GRACE missions, the team achieved a measurement of frame-dragging with a relative uncertainty of just one part in a thousand. This represents an order-of-magnitude improvement over all previous attempts to quantify the effect within our Solar System.
Implications for gravity and geophysics
The confirmation of Einstein’s prediction serves as a significant hurdle for alternative gravity models. According to reports from MassisPost and The Armenian Report, the findings place severe constraints on scalar-tensor theories, such as Chern-Simons gravity, which suggest minor deviations from general relativity. Beyond theoretical physics, the study offers tangible benefits for Earth sciences. The increased precision in gravitational mapping allows for a more accurate understanding of lunisolar tides and the complexities of Earth’s gravitational field, providing essential data for geophysics.
A growing legacy of international collaboration
This publication marks a major milestone for the A.I. Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory’s participation in global space missions alongside the Italian Space Agency and the European Space Agency. For Professor Gurzadyan, this achievement follows a series of high-profile interdisciplinary contributions, including recent work on the historical and structural analysis of Armenia’s vishapakars, or dragon stones. The international scientific community has widely lauded the LARES-2 results as a definitive moment in modern astrophysics, reinforcing the fundamental validity of Einstein’s century-old framework.
The success of the LARES-2 mission illustrates how specialized, high-precision satellite instrumentation acts as a bridge between abstract cosmological theory and practical planetary science, effectively turning Earth into a laboratory for testing the limits of fundamental physics.