It was the exact way Einstein had predicted that gravitational waves would be discovered. Scientists described these waves as a compression and stretching of space-time, in a manner similar to a balloon being squeezed by two hands.
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A number of figures have come close to proving their existence, from Russian physicists to researchers at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology, with two American scientists coming closest in 1993.
For astrophysicists interested in the most violent events the cosmos can dish up, the news is welcome.
“The area of the final black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the initial black holes as predicted by my black hole area theorem”, he said.
The computer-generated depiction of the ripple in space-time caused by colliding black holes. “We’re getting a signal which arrives at Earth, and we can put it on a speaker, and we can hear these black holes go, ‘Whoop.’ There’s a very visceral connection to this observation”. “Now we can study them directly through gravity waves, even if they do not emit any light”.
Physicists have been able to show through quantum theory that three of the four forces have a common ancestor.
All this work was done at LIGO at Hanford and the twin station in Louisiana. Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the Sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other. At the end of each tube is a mirror that reflects the light back to the point where it was split.
Gravity waves travel in waves. “The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionize astronomy”.
At the beginning of the signal, their calculations told them how stars perish: the two objects had begun by circling each other 30 times a second.
The change in length that the team measured was 1/1000th the size of a proton. On Thursday, to prove they found a gravitational wave, the researchers played a recording of the sounds. The original conversion to sound waves evokes the thump of a heartbeat, while an adjusted version created to better accommodate the range of human hearing could be mistaken for a drop of water falling into a bucket. In the case of last September’s detection, the result is a brief chirp.
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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. “We’re at the beginning of a new era of astronomy”, said Saulson at a Thursday press conference at SU.
