Ateneo alumna confirms Einstein's theory of relativity

MANILA, Philippines - A new study confirming the existence of dark matter and dark energy, as first proposed by Albert Einstein, is rocking the world of astrophysics.

The finding suggests that the invisible substance called dark matter and the even more mysterious force known as dark energy are not just figments of physicists’ imaginations.

That study, which appeared in the journal Nature last week, was done by a team headed by Ateneo alumna Reinabelle Reyes, an astrophysicist based at Princeton University in New Jersey.

According to the National Geographic Daily News, the study done by Reyes and her team validated how Einstein’s theory of general relativity accurately predicts the way galaxies that are 3.5 billion light-years from earth are clustered together.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1916, proposed that gravity works on large scales because matter warps the fabric of space and time, also known as space-time. 

Data from around 70,000 elliptical galaxies were studied. The team’s method for their breakthrough study consisted of putting together measurements of galaxies’ clustering with other properties. Through these measurements, the team was able to calculate EG, or the amount of objects’ expected interactions.

“From the galaxies’ positions, we can tell how clustered they are. That gives us information about how gravity acts, because that’s what gravity does – it pulls things together,” said Reyes.

Reyes also made the front pages of newspapers in 2008 when, as the head of the team from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II), she identified a hidden population of powerful black holes. Using the distinctive light-spectrum signature that even highly obscured quasars show as a marker, the SDSS-II team sifted through more than a million spectra to discover 887 hidden quasars, by far the largest sample of these objects ever found.

Reyes graduated with a degree in Physics, summa cum laude, from the Ateneo de Manila University in 2005. At present, she is a graduate student in Astrophysics at Princeton University. Previously, she studied theoretical particle physics at the International Center of Theoretical Physics (ICTP) for a year at Trieste, Italy.