Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime itself, and are thrown out by black holes and dying stars -which scientists might now be able to get a better view of.
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Just a few months ago, those waves registered here on Earth as teeny, tiny blip; a blip that could help unlock the secrets of the universe. “We may even see relics of the very early universe, during the Big Bang, and the most extreme energies possible”, Hawking said.
According to the National Geographic, the LIGO is a mirror-based experiment and the signal it received is characteristic of the expected sound of the death and merging of two black holes.
Gravitational waves sent out from a pair of colliding black holes have been converted to sound waves, as heard in this animation. Weiss is one of the scientists who proposed LIGO for the waves’ detection in the 1980s, the release said.
Up to now astronomy has mainly relied on light to study the universe.
Syracuse University physicists and students were part of an out-of-this-world discovery: the faint sound of two black holes colliding at close to light speed, 1.3 billion light years from Earth.
A century long endurance is paid off, as the highly elusive “gravitational waves” have finally been detected. obviously there is great ripples within the global physics community, astrophysicists and cosmologists.
“Apart from testing general relativity, we could hope to see black holes throughout the history of the universe. My research interest since 1987 has been in the detection/observation of gravitational waves, their data analysis and the modelling of gravitational wave detectors”, Dhurandhar was quoted as saying. Discovery of gravitational waves confirms their existence.
Caused by the movement of mass, these waves are so weak they require highly sensitive equipment to detect them. “This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory”.
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For the last more than two decades the LIGO has been working without pause on this project. On Thursday, to prove they found a gravitational wave, the researchers played a recording of the sounds.
