Days after the discovery of gravitational waves, the government today gave an “in-principle approval” for establishing a state-of-the-art LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) project in the country.
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Last week, entire science community showed excitement on gravitational waves’ detection, and the waves deserve the center stage, said Vicky Kalogera, a researcher of black hole at Northwestern University and a member of LIGO team that detected the waves.
It confirms a major prediction of the theory of relativity of Albert Einstein. Although they did not detect any unusual bursts of visible light, their observations were used to place constraints on the brightness for future attempts. The instrument rapidly mapped the part of the sky where the signal originated. “We discovered over 50 new sources that are normal supernovae – exploding stars that we find all the time”. The sound these gravitational waves would produce is a chirp sound (much like when increasing the pitch rapidly on a slide whistle) since the binary system’s orbital frequency is increasing (any increase in frequency corresponds to an increase in pitch). “We didn’t see any hint of unusual behavior”.
Last week, researchers at the observatory Ligo (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), based in the U.S., announced that they had detected waves resulting from the collision of two black holes there are 1.3 billion years.
Unfortunately, the team was unable to locate the burst of light emitted by the merging black holes. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t looking.
The idea for LIGO was born at MIT during the late 1960s, so this discovery was more than fifty years in the making. The subsequent calculations and deductions that ensued from this detection led the scientists to theorise that it must have come from the merging of two black holes.
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Japan’s space agency said the ASTRO-H satellite, developed in collaboration between the agency, USA space agency Nasa and other groups, is set to orbit at an altitude of about 580km and observe X-rays emanating mainly from black holes and galaxy clusters. A supercomputer at the university was instrumental in examining the data coming from the US-based detectors.
