One of the consequences of Einsteins theories of relativity is that everything will be affected by gravitational potentials, regardless of their mass. The effect of this is observed in experiments demonstrating the potential for gravity to bend light. But a more subtle realization is that light escaping such a gravitational well must lose energy, and since energy for light is related to wavelength, this will cause the light to increase in wavelength through a process known as gravitational redshifting.
Since the amount of redshift is dependent on just how deeply inside a gravitational well a photon is when it starts its journey, predictions have shown that photons being emitted from the photosphere of a main sequence star should be more redshifted than those coming from puffed out giants. With resolution having reached the threshold to detect this difference, a new paper has attempted to observationally detect this difference between the two.
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Read the rest of Gravitational Redshifts: Main Sequence vs. Giants (437 words)
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