His experiments over the coming years would involve placing occulting disks in front of the Sun to determine its precise shape, which affects its gravitational influence on the objects in the solar system, including Mercury; bouncing lasers off the Moon and using the round-trip time to measure its distance from Earth, which would indicate if its orbit was varying from Einstein’s math in the same way that Mercury’s orbit varied from Newton’s math; and using the chemical composition of stars to trace their age and evolution, which in turn would be important for tracing the age and evolution of
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