Researchers at the $620M Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States said on Thursday that they had detected minute ripples in the structure of space-time for the first time.
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Not only was this the first time anyone had detected a gravity wave, but the discovery also marked the first confirmation of two black holes fusing together. Gravitational waves were discovered by physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, 100 years ago.
Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space-time that are set off by extremely violent, cosmic cataclysms in the early universe.
“What’s really wonderful about this is, this is the first time that this kind of a system has ever been seen, a binary black hole merger”, said David Reitze, LIGO Laboratory Executive Director, at a press conference announcing the discovery.
Scientists obtained evidence of two black holes merging, proving a key tenet of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This is considered to be an enormous achievement as the gravitational waves are very hard to detect.
“It’s momentous … it marks the beginning of our ability to peek at the universe through a completely new window”, says Lehner.
“Many years of my own work developing numerical simulations to model potential sources of gravitational waves was motivated by this prospect, and it is truly exciting that instead of speculating about potential observations, we can now analyze detected signals and learn about exotic objects lurking in the Universe”. Until now, however, we had never been able to detect them. These are black holes. They are produced in many ways but it takes the motions of dense and massive objects like black holes and neutron stars to produce strong enough waves to be detectable by instruments on Earth. To date, we’d been able only to see their aftereffects – black holes themselves were a conjecture.
The LIGO collaboration includes more than 1,000 scientists from universities around the world, including researchers from the INDIGO consortium – a group of researchers from several institutions, including Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore. The mass, in this case it was two black holes colliding, stirs space and time, generating “gravitational waves” that ripple out from the collision at the speed of light.
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The Universe is speaking and now we are listening! This collision created gravitational waves, which travelled 1.3 billion light years to reach the earth now.
