Scientists have what they call a “five-sigma” standard of proof, and LIGO’s researchers say the gravitational wave discovery exceeds that. This detection therefore marks the beginning of a new field of astronony – gravitational-wave astronomy – offering us a new perspective on the Universe.
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To make sense of the raw data, the scientists translated the wave into sound.
They originated from two black holes, each around 30 times the mass of the Sun and located more than 1.3 billion light years from Earth, coalescing to form a single, even more massive black hole. We can’t wait to see what gravitational waves reveal about our vast, majestic universe in the years to come.
Columbia University physicist Szabolcs Marka, leader of the LIGO member Columbia Experimental Gravity Group, has been working on the project for more than a decade.
Incredibly the waves themselves were detected back in September 2015 when two locations of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) gathered similar readings in the aftermath of two black holes merging.
It’s really comparable only to Galileo taking up the telescope and looking at the planets… “Our understanding of the heavens changed dramatically”.
The time it took to tell the world about the waves, however, was not almost as long as the time it took for the gravitational wave to rearch Earth. “It’s one thing to know soundwaves exist, but it’s another to actually hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”, said Marc Kamionkowsi, a physicist at Hopkins University. They were planned, built, and are operated by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The violent merging of the black holes in deep space resulted in huge gravitational waves, which one could never have imagined.
A key piece of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the proposed existence of gravitational waves, has been directly observed and confirmed by scientists.
The instrument that detected the waves consists of two 2.5 mile tunnels in Louisiana, and Washington state. The detection will now prove to be the key to all the secrets that can be unlocked using Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
The black hole collision moved the LIGO mirrors only 4/1,000-diameter of a proton.
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For a more in-depth explanation of the significance of this discovery, look after the jump for a quote from an email a SEAS physics professor sent out to students yesterday about the event.
