But gravitational waves can freely propagate through the hot plasma of the very early universe, so scientists can use them to gain insight into what occurred during that otherwise invisible time.
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Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity first predicted the existence of the mysterious waves in 1916.
“Being able to detect gravity waves opens an entirely new window in astronomy”, says Will Kinney, professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.
The “sensitive measuring thing” is the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, which are in Louisiana and Washington in the US.
Cal State Fullerton researchers were key contributors to the detection of gravitational waves that were first discovered on September 14, 2015. The black holes rapidly orbited each other and finally melded together into one black hole, emitting waves. But hunting them down took decades of hard work. It could even tell us about events further back in time, possibly as far back as the Big Bang, since gravitational waves are virtually unaffected by the substances they pass through. The phrase has been on everyone’s lips.
“Well, a long time ago, a really smart guy named Einstein said that stars and planets and stuff should make ripples in space, and he used some really cool math to explain why he thought that”.
“The more massive the object, the larger the wave and the easier for scientists to detect. It’s a whole new sense”, Evan said.
Mirrors set up by LIGO to detect gravitational waves. “We think that space is just something that you walk through and that it’s the same for everybody, but [Einstein] changed that”. These cosmic ripples speed up in frequency and rises in amplitude as the black holes merge, then quickly die down once the union is complete, creating a kind of cosmic chirp.
“The observed properties of this system is consistent with predictions about black holes that I made in 1970 here in Cambridge”, Hawking, research director at Cambridge University’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, said.
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“Our group has been solving Einstein’s equations on supercomputers to predict the precise form of the signal that should be seen”.
