The gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015, at 5.51 a.m.by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington.
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“LISA Pathfinder will pave the way for the eLISA mission by testing in space the very concept of gravitational wave detection”, the website said.
In a recorded statement, he stated, “I would like to congratulate the LIGO team on their groundbreaking discovery”.
“With this discovery, we humans are embarking on a marvelous new quest, the quest to explore the warped side of the universe objects and phenomena that are made from warped space time”.
The waves were unleashed by the collision of the black holes – extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by the Jewish, Germany-born physicist.
“The discovery of gravitational waves could open a new window in our universe, because before we studied it only using electromagnetic [knowledge], and now we can do it in nearly all wave bands, from radio waves to gamma rays”, Ivanov said.
The theory of gravitational waves was developed by the German physicist 100 years ago.
One was the first document in which Einstein fully presented his theory of gravitational waves, while the other was a page from his 46-page theory of relativity, written in 1916 and 1915 respectively.
Recent rumors of the success in detecting gravitational waves, or as some scientists put it “very weak spacetime wiggles which propagate at the speed of light” were officially confirmed Thursday.
“This expands hugely the way we can observe the cosmos, and the kinds of physics and astrophysics we can do”, said professor Sheila Rowan, Director of the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research. “This is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of a binary black hole merger”. Today scientists announced that that they have detected gravitational waves for the first time, ushering in a new era of physics. They were able to detect remarkably small vibrations from passing gravitational waves.
He also went on to give the listeners an idea of how much history, even before Einstein, went into shaping the science that led to the discovery of gravitational waves.
Einstein had predicted such a phenomenon would occur when two black holes collided, but it had never before been observed.
The wave arrived first at the Louisiana detector, then at the Washington instrument 7.1 milliseconds later.
Nearly immediately after turning on equipment that had taken 25 years of perfecting, scientists detected the gravitational waves caused by collision of two black holes – one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller – a full 1.3 billion years ago.
The discovery will open infinite opportunities for discovering the mysteries of Space and time.
“The theory describes geometry of space and time”.
The LIGO observatories were conceived, built and are operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Black holes, the even-more-extreme remains of dead stars, could be expected to do the same, but nobody knew if they existed in pairs or how often they might collide. “Data was streaming, and then ‘bam, ‘” recalled David Reitze, a Caltech professor who is the director of the LIGO Laboratory, the group that built and runs the detectors.
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Each LIGO detector has two giant perpendicular arms more than 2 miles long. “It confirms the existence of gravitational waves directly”. LIGO is what we call an interferometer, consisting of two 4km “arms” set at right angles to each other, protected by concrete tubes, and a laser beam which is shone and reflected back and forth by mirrors at each end. When he heard about the wave, he said, “it was just sort of a sigh of happiness”.
