The discovery was made a century after Albert Einstein in 1915 predicted the concept of gravitational waves, but he suspected they were so small they could never be detected, Smith said.
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“I started my career by studying general relativity and was very interested in the thermodynamics of blackholes”.
According to him, the existence of a binary black hole system was possible (none had been discovered at the time), and he would go on to describing their properties.
A handful of Kiwi scientists are working on the project, including Auckland University Head of Physics Richard Easther.
The historic search of the existence of gravitational waves was announced in the United States.
“Up until now, we have been deaf to the universe”, Reitze said. Now it’s just a question of what’s next for space exploration, and how the discovery of gravitational waves can shape the way we see the rest of the universe.
They were captured by the LIGO-Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, facility in Louisiana at 551AM on 14 September, 2015, and confirmed by another such device in Washington state.
Gravitational waves are the ripples of space-time, believed to be caused by most explosive events in the Universe and thought to transport energy across the Universe. The LIGO team expects to detect them perhaps 3-4 times a year. The more massive the object, the larger the wave and the easier for scientists to detect.
The scientists poured over the data for months before announcing the discovery and releasing their science this week.
“It’s a really big event”, says Saul Teukolsky, a theoretical astrophysicist at Cornell University.
In a landmark discovery for physics and astronomy, scientists yesterday said they have glimpsed the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time that Albert Einstein predicted a century ago.
The gist is that the LIGO project recorded the sound of two black holes colliding.
The detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole, they said at a news conference in Washington, Xinhua reported.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the space-time fabric triggered by colliding blackholes or a neutron star (that is formed by explosive death of another star). They merged some 1.3 billion light years from the Earth. The phenomenon as observed by two US-based underground detectors, being developed to identify the tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves.
LIGO can measure this astronomical storm using two 4-kilometer-long (about two and a half miles), L-shaped lasers, two mirrors and a detector.
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In 1983, Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a plan that the National Science Foundation (NSF) agreed to fund. They spread across space, minutely distorting everything in their path.
