The LIGO uses a setup with laser beams, light detectors and mirrors to detect the faint shortening or lengthening of long distances that occurs as gravitational waves ripple through the Earth.
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The first time Albert Einstein discovered these gravitational waves back in the year 1916 and this was all part of the famous theory of relativity. One of them had 29 times the mass of the sun and the other 36 times the solar mass, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth, the researchers said. That’s a lot of gravitational waves that we can now detect!
He said the discovery will have a profound impact on how we understand our universe.
Gravitational waves are ripples that stretch and squeeze space itself as they travel across the universe.
A billion years ago, a billion light years away, two black holes collided, sending waves of energy hurtling through space.
Scientists at Sheffield University have helped to make one of the biggest space discoveries of all time which looks set to herald a new type of astronomy and unlock wonders of the universe.
“Both the two black holes observed in this event are way larger than any stellar-mass black holes that have been observed”. WSU participants Sukanta Bose, postdoctoral researcher Nairwita Mazumder, graduate students Bernard Hall and Ryan Magee, all physicists; and astrophysicists Fred Raab and Greg Mendell worked at the LIGO Hanford facility and contributed to the discovery.
Research scientist Gabriela González said: “This detection is the beginning of a new era: the field of gravitational wave astronomy is now a reality”.
He continued, “It’s the first time the Universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves”. If there is one constant in the development of modern physics, it is the number of times his insights into the nature of the universe – as expressed in his complex formulations of general relativity – have been vindicated.
I greatly admire the gravitational wave pioneers who had the vision and confidence that this is possible, and the team who made it happen!
During 1962, a pair of Russian physicists proposed an optical method of detecting gravitational waves, but the paper was largely ignored. In fact, the mystery of the Big Bang can also be finally unveiled.
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When scientists captured the sound of two black holes colliding in space, they did it with a system of supercomputers designed and built by Nor-Tech, a Burnsville firm that’s relatively new in the supercomputing industry.
