Albert Einstein Was Right: Gravitational Waves Do Exist

“Before we started detecting gravitational waves, looking out at the universe was like watching an orchestra without any sound”.

David Reitze, Executive Director of the U.S.based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), said in Washington that the gravitational waves which were predicted 100 years, ago by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, was one of the two pillars of modern physics.

The gist is that the LIGO project recorded the sound of two black holes colliding. The researchers say the waves emanated from two black holes merging into one larger black hole over a billion years ago. The famous physicist Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these waves 100 years ago.

The discovery of the waves is important for the scientific community because it will open up a new way to see and hear the universe, allowing astronomers to now search and see objects we previously didn’t know existed. In 1916, Einstein proposed the existence of gravitational waves in his ground-breaking general theory of relativity. This distortion is similar to how gravitational waves work.

September 14, 2015 marked the first time when the scientists detected the gravitational waves. That means the Sun and Earth emit gravitational waves too. The stretching and contracting of the fabric of space-time in response to gravitational waves is tiny – for the 2.5-mile-long (4 kilometers) arms of the detector, the change in distance is about a thousandfold smaller than the width of a proton. The best example could be a binary system, here a pair of stars or black holes orbit their common centre of mass.

Cornell physics and astrophysics professor Saul Teukolsky has been using supercomputers to solve Einstein’s equations for black hole mergers for much of his career.

The discovery announced yesterday could shed new light on mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy, and even the so-called “Big Bang” and the birth of the universe.

The worldwide scientific group LIGO reports they’ve found the first hard evidence of gravitational waves.

Both waves speed up at the same rate, a property which is caused by the increasingly fast rotation of the two black holes as they approach their imminent collision.