Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been proved right after more than a hundred years. But those waves carry 100 billion times less energy than two merging black holes, making it impossible to detect with current technology.
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The “sensitive measuring thing” is the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, which are in Louisiana and Washington in the US.
“This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory”.
UT astronomy students watched the big announcement Thursday in class.
“Well, a long time ago, a really smart guy named Einstein said that stars and planets and stuff should make ripples in space, and he used some really cool math to explain why he thought that”.
“The discovery of gravitational waves is, I think, the most important breakthrough in modern science”, Szabolcs Marka told CNN in an interview Thursday. This merger of two black holes had been predicted before, but never detected. But, if a gravitational wave happens to pass through at the same time, then it will distort spacetime, essentially stretching or compressing the length of one of the tunnels and changing the distance that one of the beams of light has to travel. Scientists said they hope to have a greatest hits compilation of the universe in a decade or so. Gravitational waves have been present in the universe since the Big Bang, and now it can all be traced back. The end result is that for the first time, Earthlings can actually hear the sound of two black holes colliding.
“With this discovery, we humans are embarking on a marvelous new quest: the quest to explore the warped side of the universe”, said LIGO co-founder Kip Thorne. Gravitational waves have been a theoretical prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity for the past 100 years.
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“We have a completely new tool to study the universe and answer questions which were not answerable so far”, Stojkovic says. “He invented some of the key features, especially the recycling of laser light to effectively increase the path length”.
