After a 100 year long search, Albert Einstein’s theory has come true.
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They originated during the split second when two black holes, which form when a massive star collapses in upon itself, collided and merged into one, after orbiting each other in a gravitational dance for billions of years.
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.
Scientists sounded positively giddy over the discovery.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves”.
Scientists made an extraordinary announcement today – for the first time, ripples known as gravitational waves have been observed in the fabric of spacetime.
Gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that can not otherwise be obtained. “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”.
The “sensitive measuring thing” is the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, which are in Louisiana and Washington in the US.
“We can hear gravitational waves”. He said that when these objects collide, they send out ripples in the curvature of space and time that propagate as gravitational waves.
Now scientists hope that they can find success launching even more ambitious attempts to capture the waves.
And it all started with Einstein, who, with this discovery proving his theory, will inspire another generation pulled in by this latest breakthrough. “Now we can look at the universe using waves of gravity”. “Now we can listen to the universe where we were deaf before”. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed.
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Einstein was right, said Rainer Weiss, co-founder of LIGO and a professor of physics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s like we were deaf so far and this is a completely new window onto the universe for discovery”. The discovery will give scientists an opportunity to observe the “dark” side of the cosmos, nearly back to the beginning of time itself.
