David Reitze, the executive director of LIGO, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, said the discovery is a “scientific moonshot” that many, even Einstein, believed would be hard to detect.
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Accordingly, the signal LIGO received of the black hole merger was played on speakers for eager scientists.
But this wasn’t just some little “chirp”.
As the black holes spiral closer and closer in together, the frequency of the gravitational waves increases.
The first gravitational-wave signal was picked up at the LIGO’s Hanford observatory in Washington State and then, seven thousands of a second later, an identical signal was picked up at LIGO’s Livingston site in Louisiana some 2,000 miles away.
“As we open a new window into astronomy, we may see things we’ve never seen before”, Reitze said.
“With this discovery, we humans are embarking on a marvelous new quest, the quest to explore the warped side of the universe objects and phenomena that are made from warped space time”. They literally look for changes in the space/time distance by measuring all components of a wave moving through the Earth.
While scientists haven’t found the best way to apply the theory to the benefit of the general public, Timbie said, it is a groundbreaking discovery in the field of physics and astronomy. The team made key upgrades to giant detectors which enabled them to capture the 1.3 billion-year-old “thud” from one of the waves – which finally proves the universe can be “heard”. Scientists described these waves as a compression and stretching of space-time, in a manner similar to a balloon being squeezed by two hands.
Dr Danny Steeghs, from the University of Warwick, said: “This is a fantastic technical achievement by the LIGO team, a highly deserved reward after many years of effort and technology development”. These ripples are what were known as gravitational waves, caused by heavy objects, but their existence was not proven, until now.
To get behind the scenes of this major discovery, The Kavli Foundation hosted an exclusive roundtable discussion on Thursday with three key LIGO researchers, who are all part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI).
Sir Martin Rees, writing for the Telegraph said this detection is one of the great discoveries of the decade, “up there with the detection of the Higgs particle”.
The gravitational waves – ripples in space-time – were created by the merging of two black holes, Reitze said.
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The worldwide hunt for proof of gravitational waves began more than a quarter of a century ago and culminated in the construction of detectors in Louisiana and Washington State. Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Indian scientists for their role, and also approved a project to have a gravitational-wave detector in India.
