Scientists detect gravitational waves predicted by Einstein hundred years ago
12 Feb 2016
With the detection of gravitational waves, which was met by great excitement in the physics world yesterday, a new window on the universe and its most violent phenomena is expected to open.
As hypothesised by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago, scientists had for the first time detected gravitational waves, in a landmark discovery.
According to the researchers, they detected gravitational waves coming from two distant black holes - extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by Einstein - that orbited one another, spiraled inward and smashed together.
The added, the waves were produced by a collision between two black holes roughly 30 times the mass of the Sun, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said California Institute of Technology physicist David Reitze, triggering applause at a packed news conference in Washington.
The announcement of a press conference on Thursday revived rumors that have been circulating in the scientific community for months that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) team might indeed have directly detected gravitational waves for the first time.
The team used a pair of giant laser detectors in the US, located in Louisiana and Washington state, which capped the decades-long quest to find these waves.
"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.
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.
The wobble generated following the collision of the black holes was detected by some of the world's most sophisticated machines in September last year.
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