Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime which propagate as waves, moving outward from the source.
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Strong gravitational waves are emitted from regions of space-time, where gravity is very strong and the velocities of the bulk motions of matter are near the speed of light.
The waves carry with them information on not only the cataclysmic origins of the phenomena in question, but also invaluable clues as to the nature of gravity itself. Creighton started working with the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 1994.
Dr Ed Daw, of the University of Sheffield’s Physics Department, helped with the research leading to the history making global announcement this afternoon at simultaneous press conferences in Washington DC, Louisiana, London and Paris. Gravitational waves have been present in the universe since the Big Bang, and now it can all be traced back. The telltale signature that a gravitational wave had passed through the experiment was finally detected last September, and announced yesterday following months of intensive verification by the LIGO-Virgo team.
The astronomers are so cautious that they routinely have other scientists deliberately inject false data to test their abilities.
“We’re humans, we’re curious, and on a quest to understand such weird things that are a big part of our universe”, Kip Thorne, a physicist at Caltech and a cofounder of LIGO, told Tech Insider. Hinting at the dawn of a new era in physics, they believe that the discovery will go a long way in our understanding of the universe. Now that the existence of gravitational waves has been confirmed, scientists hope to look at the Universe with “gravitational” eyes.
All this work was done at LIGO at Hanford and the twin station in Louisiana.
A team of researchers has detected gravitational waves, 100 years after Einstein predicted so.
The breakthrough discovery will give astrophysicists “new eyes” with which to observe the Universe. And anyone who assumes that gravitational waves will never be harnessed for any useful objective risks joining those who called the transistor a toy. They could also enable us to probe black holes directly, hitherto impossible because they absorb all forms of energy, even light.
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The catastrophic collision of the two black holes 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun respectively, created a single, more massive spinning black hole. Eventually, observations of a variety of black hole events could provide more precise estimates of cosmic distances, he said.
