“It’s the first time the universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves”, said Reitze.
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“Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn’t hear the music”, said Columbia University astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka, a member of the discovery team.
The wobble generated following the collision of the black holes was detected by some of the world’s most sophisticated machines in September past year.
Astronomers have detected gravitational waves from two merging black holes located more than a billion light years from Earth.
About three times the mass of the Sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second – with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe.
“The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time, a storm in which time speeded up, and slowed down, and speeded up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way”, Caltech physicist Kip Thorne said. Black holes, for example, do not emit light, radio waves and the like, but can be studied via gravitational waves. Discovery of gravitational waves would confirm their existence.
The existence of gravitational waves was first demonstrated indirectly in the 1970s and 1980s by American scientists who found a binary pulsar whose orbit was slowly shrinking over time because of the release of energy in a way Einstein’s theory predicted.
As the gravitational waves warped space-time within LIGO’s gargantuan, twin detectors, its exquisitely sensitive instruments registered vibrations on the order of thousands of the diametre of a proton, the scientists said.
Indian scientists and researchers from Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), ICTS-TIFR Bangalore, Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Kolkata and Trivandrum, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) AGandhinagar, Institute of Plasma Research (IPR) Gandhinagar, IUCAA Pune, Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT) Indore and TIFR Mumbai participate in LSC under the umbrella of Indian Initiative in Gravitational-Wave Observations (IndIGO).
Some physicists said the finding is as big a deal as the 2012 discovery of the subatomic Higgs boson, known as the “God particle”.
“Cambridge”, Hawking, research direct or at Cambridge University’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, said.
The discovery of gravitational waves is like opening another of our senses, Marka told CNN’s Rachel Crane: hearing the universe as well as seeing it. Also, gravitational waves are unchanged by the matter they move through.
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Gabriela Gonzalez, LSC spokesperson and professor of physics and astronomy at the Louisiana State University, echoed the same view, saying: “This detection is the beginning of a new era: The field of gravitational wave astronomy is now a reality”. We have the opportunity to study in a completely different way obscure phenomena.
