Scientists at the LIGO Collaboration have discovered the existence of Gravitational waves generated from the collision of two black-holes more than a Billion light years away from the Earth.
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The discovery of gravitational waves “may inaugurate a new era of astronomy in which gravitational waves are tools for studying the most mysterious and exotic objects in the universe”, said The Washington Post. Takaaki Kajita, a Nobel laureate in physics will search for the waves using Japan’s detector, called Kagra, in Gifu Prefecture.
The euphoria over the discovery of gravitational waves by the LIGO (Laser Interferometer of Gravitational-wave Observatory) team has given a new connotation to “chirp”. But those waves carry 100 billion times less energy than two merging black holes, making it impossible to detect with current technology.
“It will allow us to build space craft that will detect the gravitational waves and it will investigate the signals and investigate the source of the signals and allow us to explore the universe in a different way”. The phrase has been on everyone’s lips.
Scientists added that three times the mass of the Sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second with a peak power output 50 times that of the whole visible universe.
Dhurandhar, who was one of the 1,000 key scientists involved in detecting the gravitational waves, suggested the existence of these weak waves as early as 1980s, but the scientific community was not very receptive then. Astrophysict Szabolcs Márka, has proclaimed that the skies will never be the same after this phenomenal proof that approves the presence of gravitational waves. Cofounded in 1992 by Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT, LIGO is a joint project between scientists at MIT, Caltech, and many other colleges and universities. This is not just about the detection of gravitational waves… what’s really exciting is what comes next. Gravitational waves pass through everything, so the result traveled through the universe for that time before reaching Earth. “We will hear when a black hole eats a neutron star”, Marka said.
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The sound of two black holes colliding.
