Gravitational waves are small distortions, or ripples, in the fabric of spacetime. “And, surprisingly, the source of the waves is a system of two black holes in orbit around each other, that spiral inward and smash together”.
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On Thursday, a team of scientists announced a discovery which is sure to win them a Nobel Prize.
“Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn’t hear the music”, said Columbia University astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka, a member of the discovery team.
In simple words, a gravitational wave is a ripple that stretches and compresses space and everything in its path. When the merger was taking place, during its final seconds, the holes created exponential amounts of energy into space. Their existence was predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity a century ago, but until now, no instruments were sensitive enough to detect them. The end result is that for the first time, Earthlings can actually hear the sound of two black holes colliding. That means the Sun and Earth emit gravitational waves too.
Some of the key tasks including the confirmation of the agreement of observed signal with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, searching for a possible electromagnetic counterpart using optical telescopes and others were performed at ICTS, Bengaluru and IUCAA, Pune.
“Well, a long time ago, a really smart guy named Einstein said that stars and planets and stuff should make ripples in space, and he used some really cool math to explain why he thought that”.
The discovery of this was made on Thursday at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) center.
Decades after the departure of genius theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, scientists said he was right about gravitational waves. Astrophysict Szabolcs Márka, has proclaimed that the skies will never be the same after this phenomenal proof that approves the presence of gravitational waves.
These black holes were each about 93 miles in diameter – roughly 50 miles wider than the width of Washington, D.C.
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Physicist Szabi Marka, a LIGO collaborator based at Columbia University, gushed about the coming scientific revolution to a crowded Columbia lecture hall in NY.
