Detecting gravitational waves is so hard that when Einstein first theorized about them, he figured scientists would never be able to hear them.
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Columbia University physicist Szabolcs Marka, leader of the LIGO member Columbia Experimental Gravity Group, has been working on the project for more than a decade.
Space-time is the mind-bending, four-dimensional way astronomers see the universe. The detection will now prove to be the key to all the secrets that can be unlocked using Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
The news was hailed as a double triumph, given that this is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of the merging of a pair of black holes.
Indeed, black holes are a holy grail of the gravitational wave concept. They included representatives from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).
“We did it!” Reitze said to an unusual standing ovation. Albert Einstein predicted them in 1916 as part of his general theory of relativity.
In 2014, scientists reported observing signs of primordial gravitational waves created by the big bang, but the team later backed off the claim. The LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington utilize laser light as a very precise stopwatch to measure this effect. “The first event has shown that there are plenty of black holes of tens of solar masses, thereby resolving the long debated issue of their existence”.
However, the waves are so small that it takes a detector like LIGO, capable of measuring distortions one-thousandth the size of a proton, to observe them.
The scientists said that the wave, when listened to, sounds like a chirp – one not unlike a slide whistle.
Fred Raab knew back in the ’80s that he had to decide: look for these gravitational waves, or do something else with his life? Up until now we’ve been deaf to gravitational waves.
The new LIGO in some frequencies is three times more sensitive than the old one and is able to detect ripples at lower frequencies that the old one couldn’t.
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“And when we hear the universe, we will learn about the secret life of black holes – their birth, their death, their marriage, their feeding”. In the artist’s depiction, you can see two binary neutron stars on the verge of colliding, sending ripples through space-time.
