Gravitational waves – tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time first proposed by Albert Einstein a century ago – have been directly observed for the first time, a team of scientists announced this morning.
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This discovery comes almost 100 years after Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time, which carry information about space phenomena never before observed.
“The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionize astronomy”, Hawking told the BBC after LIGO’s announcement on Thursday. “We are now entering a new age of astronomy”, said Columbia University professor and World Science Festival founder Brian Greene on WNYC.
Both of LIGO’s four-kilometer super-antennas, one in Washington State and the other in Louisiana, recorded the chirp in September.
The gravitational waves stretched and compressed space around Earth “like Jell-O”.
Scientists from the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration discovered the gravitational waves as having originated from something that happened about 1.3 billion years ago. “And, surprisingly, the source of the waves is a system of two black holes in orbit around each other, that spiral inward and smash together”.
According to the National Geographic, the LIGO is a mirror-based experiment and the signal it received is characteristic of the expected sound of the death and merging of two black holes. Since them, scientists were trying to spot these waves, but they tasted success in finding proof about 60 years after the legend physicist’s death.
“We have a completely new tool to study the universe and answer questions which were not answerable so far”, Stojkovic says. He believed that cataclysmic events such as two black holes colliding would create the waves, which allow massive objects in space to become curved.
“Colliding black holes and gravitational waves are our first handsome examples”.
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The Reddit user continued: “Now some people built a really sensitive measuring thing that uses lasers to see them, and they just proved that their device works by seeing ripples from a really big splash”.
