“Having gravitational waves as a tool will enable us to study black holes, and black holes hold the key to so many future puzzles in science”, Szabi Marka, a LIGO collaborator at Columbia University, told Tech Insider.
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With the discovery of the waves the astronomers will be able to open a new door in observing the cosmos. “The skies will never be the same”.
Though gravitational waves had been detected indirectly before, Thursday’s announcement marked the first direct observation. When Einstein himself realised his theory predicted these waves, he thought they would be too weak to detect.
For the first time, physicists were able to hear and record the sound of two black holes colliding one billion light years away – and Urban was there. The researchers say it can be thought of like the end of the silent movie era, but for astronomy.
To make the finding easier to comprehend, the scientists converted the wave into sound.
At the news conference, they played an audio recording of this, a low rumbling pierced by chirps. “Our understanding of the heavens changed dramatically”.
The last unproven piece of Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been proven today.
“There are two black holes orbiting around each other, and they get closer and closer and start going faster and faster, until they actually merge in a big burst of gravitation waves”. LIGO was created to measure land distances because gravitational waves stretch space in one direction and compress space in the other.
“It’s proof that binary black holes exist in the universe”. To date, we’d been able only to see their aftereffects. That mismatch is what LIGO detects. “I went, ‘Holy moly, ‘” Reitze said.
UA physicists are looking into ways to use their network of telescopes to focus in on the actual events that create gravitational waves to gain even more information. “It’s mind-boggling”, Reitze said.
“It has been a long journey … we are very proud of this work taking a village – a worldwide village”, Gabriela Gonzalez, LIGO’s spokeswoman at Louisiana State University, said at the press briefing. Scientists accurately measured them and found that they clearly match the expected result from two merging black holes accelerating at half the speed of light. The greatest scientific mind of the 20th century underestimated the technological know-how of his successors. Way back in 2012, the National Science Foundation agreed to setting up a third gravity wave detector in India.
The scientists at LIGO as confident that this was merely the first of several detections during the first year of operation by the Advanced LIGO detectors. Each was perhaps 150 kilometers (90 miles) in diameter, he said.
The scientists monitor a laser beam traveling through the L-shaped arms. That mismatch is what LIGO detects.
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Cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking congratulated the scientists on a “ground-breaking” discovery. The study detailing the research in the journal Physical Review Letters had 1,004 authors.
