“Just think of radio waves, when radio waves were discovered we learned to communicate with them”. They were able to hear, and record, the sound of that massive collision: a chirp with a rising tone, which is exactly what Einstein predicted would happen in his general theory of relativity.
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The scientists first detected the waves last September 14. This first direct observation of gravitational radiation is just the next wave of information from the universe. It was barely perceptible even when enhanced.
Scientists from the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration are set to make what they bill as a “status report” on Thursday on the quest to detect gravitational waves. To say that it’s one of the biggest findings of the century is not an overstatement. Some said this is bigger.
It’s really comparable only to Galileo taking up the telescope and looking at the planets…
To help us understand this potentially game-changing physics discovery, the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo will host a panel discussion with some of Canada’s smartest brains.
A team of physicists announced Thursday that they detected the noise of two black holes colliding, evidence of the ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.
What are gravitational waves, and how does LIGO look for them? “In this case, we’re actually getting to hear black holes merging”.
“It’s the first time that we have ever seen two black holes merging”, said Fong.
The European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder mission was launched late previous year and is able to detect movements as small as one millionth of a millimetre. “I went, ‘Holy moly, ‘” Reitze said. They concluded there was less than a 1-in-3.5-million chance they were wrong, he said. In those tests, the observatory team was able to show that the injected data wasn’t real.
“We are really witnessing the opening of a new tool for doing astronomy”, MIT astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala said. The discovery is a victory not only for the scientists involved, but also for the National Science Foundation which has poured over a billion dollars into gravitational wave research over the past 40 years. Known collectively as the Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the detectors are located in Washington state and Louisiana.
Thorne and his colleagues expect that they’ll be picking up gravitational wave signals more frequently and from a greater distance in the near future. It’s so precise it can detect changes the size of a soccer ball in the entire Milky Way galaxy.
The 2½-mile-long, L-shaped LIGO interferometer uses laser light split into two beams that travel back and forth down arms, consisting of four-foot-diameter tubes kept under near-perfect vacuum.
Sensitivity is crucial because the stretching and squeezing of space-time by gravitational waves is incredibly tiny.
The scientists at LIGO as confident that this was merely the first of several detections during the first year of operation by the Advanced LIGO detectors. According to scientists, the possibilities of such a discovery were very scarce.
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The press conference coincided with the publication of a paper explaining the discovery in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
