The sound of two black holes colliding.
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UAH’s Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) was tasked with analyzing a potentially interesting piece of the data and figure out what the gravitational wave signal actually looked like.
While this can’t be physically seen, it is an artist’s rendition of what 2 black holes merging might look like if we COULD see it happening.
On February 11, 2016, scientists announced that the gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:51 UTC) by both of the twin LIGO detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. Though that little blip of noise is only a construct, what it represents are tiny contractions and stretchings in spacetime, the very fabric of the universe that resulted from two massive black holes colliding.
Perhaps even more importantly, gravitational waves could enable scientists to explore the very early stages of the universe, Stojkovic says. He said the detection would allow scientists a new window into seeing and hearing cosmic events that otherwise might not be detected.
Wang Junjie, an astrophysicist at the National Astronomical Observatories affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, “Besides the direct observation of the gravitational waves, the discovery has another two exciting aspects”.
Gravitational waves provide a completely new way of looking at the universe. This however could be the first evidence that gravity has a quantum nature just like the other forces of nature and understandably this discovery will usher in a new era in astronomy.
“Scientists call these sounds ‘chirps, ‘ because some events that generate gravitation waves would sound like a bird’s chirp”. The discovery was made during the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which predicted the relationship between time and space and has had far-reaching impacts on the field of physics and science in general.
The discovery might be one of the major scientific discoveries in decades, just as important as Galileo and his telescope 400 years ago, Reitze said.
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Mirrors set up by LIGO to detect gravitational waves. We don’t profess to be experts on this kind of thing, but we do know it made a sound of some kind. “We have observed and studied the universe only through light so far, but the discovery of gravitational waves will help us in discovering phenomena of the universe that have only been imagined”, said Raman Dhaliwal, a research scholar at the varsity.
