Reitze made the announcement Thursday at the National Press Club in Washington surrounded by other LIGO researchers and National Science Foundation head France Cordova. The two black holes cited in the discovery of the waves are estimated to be about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, the team said.
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It was most recently demonstrated in the film “Interstellar” when the crew visited a planet which fell within the gravitational grasp of a huge black hole, so that time slowed down massively.
When two black holes merge, the energy released in the form of gravitational waves is equal to the entire energy output from all of the stars in the universe during the 0.15-second collision.
“We can hear gravitational waves”.
Lasers stable enough for the dual four-kilometer arms of the interferometer didn’t exist when the project began, said Quetschke, who has worked on gravitational-wave sensing hardware since 2000.
“With something as simple as our Earth going around our sun, it’s not that there’s some gravitational force pulling on the Earth, but the space itself is subtly distorted by the gravitational effect and that causes the Earth to travel in this orbit around the sun”.
These researchers have picked up and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light years away.
While opening a door to new ways to observe the universe, scientists said gravitational waves should help them gain knowledge about enigmatic objects like black holes and neutron stars.
“Once you turn that sound on you might be able to figure out all sorts of different things to support what you’ve seen with your eyes – but also new things you might not even have expected”, said Robert Ferdman, a research associate with McGill University’s department of physics. The instruments are so sensitive that they will also detect a truck rumbling down the street, a storm brewing in the distance, or a dropped book in the control room.
“Now we can actually see and learn about ordinary black holes”, said Burgess.
“There’s been a lot of indirect evidence for their existence”, says Shoemaker, an expert in black holes. “Firstly, it confirms yet again that Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, published 101 years ago, is a supremely precise description of space and time, gravity and the evolution of the Universe”.
Other physicists, like those with the BICEP2 experiment, are searching for signs of gravitational waves from the Big Bang at the edge of the observable universe.
After 100 years, scientists have finally been able to prove Albert Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves.
But is LIGO correct? However, if a gravitational wave should happen to pass through the instrument, it would stretch one arm of the L just a teeny bit, while compressing the other arm just a teeny bit. Scientists announced the breakthrough Thursday in Washington, D.C.
“It took six months of convincing ourselves that it was correct”, says Shoemaker.
“This opens up so many possibilities”, she said.
“The fact that we are sitting here on Earth feeling the actual fabric of the Universe stretch and compress slightly due to the merger of black holes that occurred just over a billion years ago – I think that’s phenomenal. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever detected before”.
I was planning to run some measurements in the optics lab that day, but that plan went out the window..
Because the waves are largely unimpeded by matter, the scientists said, they offer a new way for astronomers to probe hidden recesses of the universe.
Brian Lantz, Stanford physicist and lead scientist for seismic isolation and alignment systems for Advanced LIGO, who was sitting at his desk when the detection popped up on his computer screen. “And the only way to find a flaw is to test it”, Marka told CNN.
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Dr. Roni Grosz, curator of the Hebrew University’s Albert Einstein Archives, holds a page from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. “Physicists are very (skeptical) of flawless theories because then we have nothing to do”.
