While the scientists’ confidence in the detector was high, they still didn’t know what was out there.
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This week, scientists confirmed one of the most significant scientific discoveries in decades: gravitational waves.
Gerry Gilmore, professor of experimental philosophy of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, spoke about what an exciting field astronomy is as he speculated about how “strings” may finally reveal themselves. It was the first time gravitational waves, predicted a century earlier by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, had been observed.
The recent announcement of detection of gravitational waves has thrown the scientific community into paroxysms of joy.
The Ligo group itself consists of a global team of more than 1,000 scientists from over 90 universities and research institutes and another group of European scientists called the Virgo Collaboration. Then, all is calm as within a second, a black hole is born. Crucially, the waves from the last few minutes of the binary’s evolution, should be detectable with laser interferometric detectors, such as LIGO and the Virgo detector in Italy.
“[Einstein made] an odd prediction: any accelerating mass should make ripples in spacetime.”
The stretching and squishing changes the tunnels’ lengths by a tiny amount, and that change can be detected by lasers. In 2010 improvements were made as no waves were found. Its official first run after the improvements is when the waves were detected. Their discovery has offered irrefutable evidence of black holes. “We’re getting a signal which arrives at Earth, and we can put it on a speaker, and we can hear these black holes go, ‘Whoop.’ There’s a very visceral connection to this observation”.
The gravitational waves that resulted from the collision of these black holes has been traveling through the universe for that whole time. The signal was brief but definitive. In the first part of the video, you hear the sound wave frequencies that exactly match the frequencies of the gravitational waves. The theory states that space and time are intertwined as four dimensional spacetime. “The area of the final black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the initial black holes as predicted by my black hole area theorem”, he said.
Kerr had been chain-smoking his way through that head-spinning math when it occurred to him: The black holes themselves were spinning. Up until now, their existence has been inferred by looking at the stars and gas swirling around them. “If black holes didn’t really exist, you couldn’t explain these waves”, he says. “Even though the information provided by the USA observatory is limited, there are fantastic discoveries waiting to be made”, Gou added. LIGO executive director David Reitze said that the event consisted of “two black holes spiraling into one another and merging”, which is impossible to see with light or electromagnetic radiation, but possible to spot with gravitational waves.
Scientists sounded positively giddy over the discovery.
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Li said time travel was less far-fetched than once thought though still not a reality. “I mean it’s preposterous”.
