The researchers said on Thursday they identified gravitational waves, described as ripples in space and time, coming from two distant black holes that orbited one another and smashed together at high speed to form a single, larger black hole, Reuters reported.
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For decades, scientists tried to detect such an event, which is too faint for most advanced scientific equipment to detect. 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.
The gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015, at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (9:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. “This is even a step further and the start of an exciting journey into all of the unknowns astrophysics has to offer”.
Fred Raab knew back in the ’80s that he had to decide: look for these gravitational waves, or do something else with his life?
Li noted that about 90 per cent of the universe remained unknown.
“The Higgs boson was very big by itself because it really allowed us to move forward in our explanation of the smallest things in the universe, but this is completely on the opposite scale”.
While the news of gravitational waves being detected on Earth is hailed as a landmark discovery, scientists will be looking forward to a major European Space Agency (ESA) mission that would seek to detect the elusive phenomenon – in space.
The waves were unleashed by the collision of the black holes – extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by the Jewish, Germany-born physicist. He says the next run will represent “a significant boost in sensitivity, where we expect we might be seeing events like this several times a month”.
The discovery of the gravitational waves and the curvature of space has prompted speculation that time travel may be possible.
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Just why the global positioning system works so accurately is because of Einstein’s theory of relativity that deducted 37 microseconds from clocks, says IITian Manish Jain, who actively works at the Science popularisation centre of IUCAA by making short films based on research.
