Scientists Discover Ripples In Space And Time

Ironically, Einstein didn’t think gravitational waves would ever be discovered.

Also among the scientists involved in the finding was Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist and expert in the formation of black holes who is the director of Northwestern University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics.

“This is just from talking to people who said they’ve seen the paper, but I’ve not seen the paper itself”, says Clifford Burgess, a theoretical physicist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in nearby Waterloo.

He added that gravitational waves will be a revolutionary tool in the study of enigmatic sources like black holes, neutron stars, and supernova explosions.

Gravitational waves were first predicted by Einstein 100 years ago, but have never been directly observed.

“Gravitational waves are literally ripples in the curvature of space-time that are caused by collisions of heavy and compact objects like black holes and neutron stars”, as per Ashtekar.

A century ago, as part of his grander theory of relativity, Albert Einstein posited that gravitational waves existed.

Twenty years later, they started building two LIGO detectors in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, and they were turned on in 2001. This behavior generates gravitational waves that permeate the cosmos, stretching and contracting the fabric of spacetime – like ripples on a pond. That’s not surprising because the frequency of these waves coming to Earth from a given volume of space – the volume of space accessible by LIGO in its first run – was predicted to be exceedingly rare. Till date, gravitational waves have been detected indirectly.

The US National Science Foundation and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory experiment will be holding a press conference early Friday morning Perth time to discuss a status report on the search for gravity waves.

The team is scheduled to give a press conference in Washington DC, where they are anticipated to reveal a clear, unambiguous gravitational wave signal.

That’s why LIGO upgraded its instrumentation, increasing its sensitivity by 10 times.

Orbiting black holes generate gravitational waves. These waves are streaming to you all the time and if you could see them, you could see back to the first one trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

United States scientists have announced the discovery of ripples in space and time known as gravitational waves, in a breakthrough that could revolutionise astronomy. “There is no other way for humanity to see the origin of the universe”, affirmed Stebbins. A dual set of identical detectors of the observatory were made to detect the “incredibly tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves”. Here’s your guide to gravitational waves, short and simple as ABC.