The group, which focuses on novel gravitational wave detection algorithms, directly contributed in testing general relativity with the black hole binary termed as GW150914.
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After months of speculation, scientists from the Advanced LIGO project confirmed they had detected gravitational waves caused by two black holes merging about 1.3 billion years ago. One black hole had the mass of 29 suns; the other was the equivalent of 36 suns.
In simple words, a gravitational wave is a ripple that stretches and compresses space and everything in its path. When the merger was taking place, during its final seconds, the holes created exponential amounts of energy into space.
About 1.2 billion years ago in a distant galaxy, two black holes ferociously circled each other, the intense gravity pulling them toward each other with such intensity that they reached half the speed of light.
AN Edinburgh-born scientist has been at the heart of work detecting gravitational waves for a landmark event described as “the biggest scientific breakthrough of the century”.
Up until this point, the scientific community has been able to use Einsteins theory and its equations, as well as supercomputers, to generate a picture of what these waves would look like.
He said for discovering the pulsar and indirectly confirming the existence of gravitational waves, the two were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics. If they can replicate it this could prove right one of Albert Einstein’s unconfirmed predictions.
Teukolsky says the discovery shows just how extraordinary the natural world can be.
Becky Ferreira explains over at Motherboard, “What the observatory picked up was a minute gravitational distortion as the wave tripped the ribbon of laser light within LIGO’s vast tunnels”.
“A hundred years since Einstein proposed General Relativity, and this is definitive proof that Einstein, as far as we can tell, was correct”, Kremer said. But he said the technology used by the worldwide team of scientists could hold the key to many more secrets of time and space, like the impact of the Big Bang – the very beginning of the universe. Now, he’s an associate professor of physics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
“With this discovery, we humans are embarking on a marvelous new quest, the quest to explore the warped side of the universe objects and phenomena that are made from warped space time”.
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Wang Junjie, an astrophysicist at the National Astronomical Observatories affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, “Besides the direct observation of the gravitational waves, the discovery has another two exciting aspects”. Knowing that gravitational waves exist will open up a great door for new scientific discoveries and even suggest that space travel and faster-than-light travel may be closer than we previously thought.
