The waves were made from two black holes crashing together more than a billion years ago.
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The discovery of this was made on Thursday at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) center.
LIGO uses 4km-long pipes to detect the waves, 3000 kilometres apart, in Washington and Louisiana.
On Thursday, scientists announced they’d discovered gravitational waves – ripples in space time.
Did Einstein predict gravitational waves? .
The discovery confirmed the General Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein and thus provides more insight into the birth of the universe including the Big Bang. Whenever the gravitational wave passed through it, the two arms, one of them stretched and the other one compressed.
If they can replicate it this could prove right one of Albert Einstein’s unconfirmed predictions. Sadly, the answer is no. “It brings us a much deeper understanding of how warp spacetime behaves when it is extremely warped”, says Thorne.
Gravitational waves provide a completely new way of looking at the universe.
Even Einstein didn’t know if gravitational waves, which he predicted were weak, could ever be measured by people on Earth, making today’s announcement huge for the scientific community.
The new facilities will help astrophysicists pinpoint the precise location of cataclysmic events such as black hole mergers and supernovas.
“We will deepen technical cooperation and professional resources exchange with prominent research institutes such as MIT, in addition to attracting foreign specialists”, Sun Yat-sen University Astronomy and Space Science Institute Dean Li Miao told The Global Times publication.
“Pack 30 times the mass of the sun into that, then accelerate it to about half the speed of light”, and that is just for one black hole, Reitze said.
Gravitational waves sent out from a pair of colliding black holes have been converted to sound waves, as heard in this animation.
Scientists hope that by detecting the waves, it may be possible to see parts of the universe that have so far remained hidden.
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But LIGO’s observations also pose a puzzle: Hawking said the black holes that collided were each more massive than what would be expected to result from the collapse of a star.
