Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity was put to test by a team led by Princeton University scientists to see whether it holds true at cosmic scales. The astronomical data was analyzed for two years and the scientists came to the conclusion that Einstein's theory works in a similar way in vast distances as it does in more local regions of space.

About 70,000 galaxies were surveyed by the scientists and it was revealed that the galaxies that are at least 3.5 billion light years away from Earth, work according to the rules set out by Einstein in his world famous theory.

In the March 11 edition of Nature, Reinabelle Reyes, a Princeton graduate student in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, with his co-authors Rachel Mandelbaum and James Gunn summarized their evaluation. The other scientists who worked on the same included Robert Smith, Lucas Lombriser, Uros Seljak and Tobias Baldauf.

Gunn said, “All of our ideas in astronomy are based on this really enormous extrapolation, so anything we can do to see whether this is right or not on these scales is just enormously important”.

Reyes shared that it is through observing the distribution of galaxies in space and measuring their velocities that the scientists managed to calculate how gravity works on distances straddling the galaxies.