Boffins hope, unlike using a traditional telescope, Gravitational Wave astronomy will now help us to understand some of the most violent events in the cosmos, including exploding stars, colliding black holes, perhaps even the Big Bang itself. “The skies will never be the same”.
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This video includes clips from NASA, the National Science Foundation, Fermilab and the California Institute of Technology.
Simply put, scientists must reconfirm the wave signals again and again, but rumors are already buzzing LIGO may have made another detection. At a news conference, they played a recording of a single chirp – the signal they picked up on September 14. Some said this is bigger.
Rumors about the LIGO discovery have been circulating for months in the world of physics, prompted by Twitter posts by Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at the Arizona State University, who was not part of the LIGO team. “Our understanding of the heavens changed dramatically”.
“People are talking Galileo looking through a telescope for the first time”, he said. As the LIGO team explained, the signs of gravitational waves they picked up on were the result of two black holes colliding, which released 50 times more energy than all the stars in the observable Universe, and lasted only a few fractions of a second. Those ripples are what scientists announced today they’re finally able to detect, giving them a microphone of sorts to now listen to the universe.
The waves were detected by a set of two LIGO instruments, located in Louisiana and Washington state. “In this case we’re actually getting to hear black holes merging”.
“It looks pretty good, but it’s not a definitive proof, I would say”. They concluded there was less than a 1-in-3.5-million chance they were wrong, he said.
McWilliams, who is originally from Pennsylvania and came to WVU three years ago, has been a LIGO member since 2005 when he was a graduate student, he said. He said the detection would allow scientists a new window into seeing and hearing cosmic events that otherwise might not be detected.
The sound was recorded just a week after scientists turned on sensitive measuring devices in Louisiana and Washington. He is working to improve the sensitivity of LIGO detectors and broaden the spectrum the detectors are sensitive to.
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What’s so great about these gravitational waves? That mismatch is what LIGO detects. “But this is the first time you can see just the gravity of objects directly, without anything else”, he said. The Brownsville-based research center has been home to more than 20 authors of a paper published February 11 by the peer-reviewed Physical Review Letters.
