Though, nothing has been confirmed by the scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a California lab that is looking for these waves.
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Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Arizona State university, tweeted that he had received independent confirmation of a rumour that has been in circulation for months, adding: “Gravitational waves may have been discovered!!”
Krauss, an award-winning physicist, started the latest rumor about the gravitational waves discovery in September and seemed to confirm it with Monday’s Twitter post, said the Washington Post, adding though that Krauss was not involved in the experiment that supposedly detected the wave.
The LIGO stations use extremely fine-tuned laser interferometers to detect the passage of gravitational waves (that can be imagined as ripples in spacetime, much like the ripples that propagate across the surface of a pond) and only weeks before Krauss’ original tweeted rumor had embarked on a new phase of sophistication, called Advanced LIGO.
These ripples are called gravitational waves and they emanate from calamitous cosmic events like when a star explodes or when two black holes bump into each other. So far, there has been no peer review or publication of the findings from the LIGO team.
The Internet is ablaze – again – over gravitational waves, the theorized dips and undulations in the fabric of spacetime produced by cataclysmic events such as colliding black holes or supernovas.
Not only that, the ability to observe gravitational waves would open a whole new frontier of astronomy. “We would have a new window on the universe”, Krauss tells the Guardian. Although gravitational waves have been indirectly observed, transporting energy from orbiting bodies; direct evidence of the extremely slight impact of the propagation of the ripples that are believed to be washing through Earth has been extremely hard to achieve. As the smaller black hole inches toward its invetiable doom, is accelerates through space at an ever-increasing rate toward the larger black hole, and, in so doing, generates gravitational waves. “I am concerned about creating false expectations in the public and the media”, she says.
Plus, physicists involved with the LIGO project had predicted their first detection happening around January 2017, meaning that if this is true, they have managed to improve on that by a year.
From 2010 to 2015, LIGO researchers completely rebuilt their instruments, aiming to make them up to 10 times more sensitive.
Scientists at LIGO aren’t taking any chances with this experiment – they don’t want another BICEP2 incident. Each machine consists of two several-mile-long arms that stretch out at right angles. Scientists split a laser beam in two and then fire each half down one of the two tunnels.
Compared to the length of light waves we see with our eyes, which are micrometers in size (about the width of a human hair), gravitational waves are huge.
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Such rumors about detecting gravitational waves have surfaced in the past, only to have them refuted.
