A consortium of astronomers said Thursday they had for the first time confirmed a prediction of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity by observing the gravitational effects of a supermassive black hole on a star zipping by it. The German-born theoretical physicist had posited that large gravitational forces could stretch light, much like the compression and stretching of sound waves we perceive with the change of pitch of a passing train. Researchers from the GRAVITY consortium led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics realised that they had a "perfect laboratory" to test Einstein's theory with the Sagittarius A* black hole in the centre of the Milky Way.
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