Einstein’s gravity waves detected; WVU professor among researchers

About 100 years ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, but they were undetectable – until now.

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.

“We’re going to start exploring the universe through this new window of gravitational waves, learning more about black holes but also about neutron stars”, Kalogera said.

“We could point the best telescopes, sensitive to more or less any electromagnetic wavelength of light, at this system and probably see nothing”, said Nergis Mavalvala, a professor of astrophysics at MIT.

“People are talking Galileo looking through a telescope for the first time”, he said. Gravitational waves are a measure of strain in space, an effect of the motion of large masses that stretches the fabric of space-time – a way of viewing space and time as a single interweaved continuum.

IN THEORY, UNTIL NOW: Gravitational waves were first predicted in 1916 by Einstein. Because the evidence of gravitational waves is captured in audio form, the finding means astronomers will now be able to hear the soundtrack of the universe and listen as violent collisions reshape the cosmos.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Livingston Laboratory detector site is located near Livingston, Louisiana.

“What we have done is taken the real signal and shifted it a bit in frequency, but it is still the real signal”, said González. “The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionize astronomy”.

LIGO, sponsored by National Science Foundation, is the joint effort of about 1,000 scientists from around the world, with majority in the U.S. A group of scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology developed the idea in the 1970s, and began officially operating it in 1999. Scientists agree it is the biggest moment in physics since the discovery of Higgs Boson – the God Particle – three years ago. This way, scientists can detect waves from objects further away in the universe, thus seeing further into the past.

What are so-called gravitational waves?

Each LIGO detector has two giant perpendicular arms more than 2 miles long.

“What the observatory picked up was a minute gravitational distortion as the wave tripped the ribbon of laser light within LIGO’s vast tunnels”, Becky Ferreira explains over at Motherboard. But with this discovery, scientists detected gravitational signals directly from black holes.

In addition, the team of 1,004 scientists on the project looked over the data, and the results were then peer-reviewed by even more experts and published in the journal Physical Review Letters.