Researchers Thursday announced they have proof of what Albert Einstein predicted more than 100 years ago – that “gravitational waves” exist in the universe, and as they ripple through galaxies they generate enough power to distort time.
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“It’s akin to when Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens and the discoveries that followed”. As soon as the news broke on Thursday, scientists discussing the significance of the major discovery revealed that it would enable us not just to see the stars, but also to listen to them.
“This is huge. It was the missing link in the theory of relativity, It proves we have the right theory of gravity”, said York University physics and astronomy professor Matthew Johnson.
“We did it. We landed on the moon”, exclaimed David Reitz, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory at Caltech, at the conference in the National Press Club.
Gravitational waves are the “soundtrack of the universe,” said team member Chad Hanna of Pennsylvania State University.
High energy physicist, Wen-fai Fong, said the discovery is very exciting. It required years of research and development to achieve this incredible feat of technology. The LIGO observatory involves two laser beam paths that are combined so that any shift along one path will produce a change in the way the other path interacts with it, at the level of the wavelength of laser light. The gravitational waves were released from the collision of two black holes, the properties of which are consistent with predictions I made in Cambridge in the 1970s, such as the black hole area and uniqueness theorems.
“There are rumours they’ve seen more than just this one”, said Burgess. The speed of these gravitational waves mirrors the speed of light-3.0 x 10 m/s. So, if you know where the black holes collide then you know when they collided. “The imprint causes undulation in the fabric of the universe”.
It was an enormous risk taken by the scientists, with no promise that the technology could be improved sufficiently to measure gravitational waves within their lifetime. Visible are the two 4km arms containing vacuum chambers used to detect gravitational wave activity. The greatest scientific mind of the 20th century underestimated the technological know-how of his successors.
The new discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a group of more than 1,000 scientists from universities around the U.S. as well as in 14 other countries. These are oscillations in space and time much like waves are oscillations in water.
“This is a watershed moment for physics and for science”, said McWilliams.
Give us a sense of what this means for our understanding of the universe.
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While this was the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, McWilliams said it is not likely the last.
