Scientists here at the University of Birmingham have been involved in the ground-breaking detection of gravitational waves, a discovery which has been dubbed as the biggest scientific breakthrough of the century.
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Gravitational waves were first detected in the black hole binary system. “We did it”, declared David Reitze of Caltech, LIGO’s executive director, during a Washington, D.C. press conference.
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been proved right after more than a hundred years.
Tiffany Summerscales, a researcher at Andrews University, has been a member with LIGO since 2000.
“This is definitive proof that they exist because there’s no other objects that would be able to create gravitational waves like this”, Kremer stated.
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). Even the first detection revealed objects that we had never seen before: two black holes orbiting each other.
Announced on Thursday, this opens a new window for studying the cosmos. Israeli real estate entrepreneur and New City Ltd. Chairman Dror Halevi, however, criticized Israeli society’s attitude toward the famous scientist. So this discovery doesn’t just confirm Einstein’s prediction.
This week, however, scientists working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) report in the journal Physical Review Letters that the highly sensitive interferometers they operate in the US and Europe have, in fact, detected the faint ripples from the dance of merging black holes over a billion years ago.
The idea of the gravitational waves first came to fore with the general theory of relativity which is regarded as Einstein’s fundamental explanation of gravity. “Up until now, we’ve been deaf”.
What are gravitational waves?Gravitational waves are propagating fluctuations of gravitational fields, i.e. “ripples” in space-time generated mainly by moving massive bodies.
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It was proven when two lasers hundreds of miles apart, refurbished and switched back on, back in September, briefly indicated their beams wavered like ripples in a pond at virtually the same time, but nowhere near as big.
