White dwarf causes strange relativity effect called frame dragging

From time being relative to things getting more massive as they accelerate, there are lots of head scratchers in relativity.But the thing that may top the strangeness scale is an effect called "frame dragging," where a massive, rotating object distorts the space-time around it. Taking advantage of a large white dwarf with a close-by neutron star, the researchers have detected frame dragging effects in the regular pulses of emission from the neutron star.The easiest way to understand frame dragging is to imagine sticking something in a pool of water and starting to rotate it. Our first image of a black hole's environment wouldn't have looked like it did if it weren't for frame dragging, although we're still working on relating these observations to the black hole's rotation.One consequence of this is that light from behind a rapidly rotating object will appear to move faster on one side than the other—not because the light moves faster, but because the space it occupies is moving. They used the decades of observations to build a model of how the system evolved over time, tracking things like the orientation of the pulsar's axis of rotation, the location of the spot closest to the white dwarf, the masses of the two objects, and so on.