Gravitational Waves From Black Hole Collision Rock Scientific World

Laser physicist Professor David Reitze, from the University of Florida, told the National Press Club: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravity waves”.

A billion years after the violent collision of two black holes in space, scientists have glimpsed gravitational waves, which travel at the speed of light and can not be stopped or blocked by anything.

If the discovery is successfully replicated by other researchers, it will be known as one of the seminal achievements in physics. Accordingly, the signal LIGO received of the black hole merger was played on speakers to audiences of eager scientists.

“This is something completely different, these are gravitational waves that by the time they get to Earth, they’re very hard to pick up”.

The first gravitational-wave signal was picked up at the LIGO’s Hanford observatory in Washington State and then, seven thousands of a second later, an identical signal was picked up at LIGO’s Livingston site in Louisiana some 2,000 miles away.

But LIGO’s observations also pose a puzzle: Hawking said the black holes that collided were each more massive than what would be expected to result from the collapse of a star.

“The gravitational waves detected agree perfectly with predictions from Einstein’s theory of relativity”, said Kip Thorne, a co-founder of LIGO and a consultant for the 2014 movie “Interstellar”.

A passing wave essentially stretches space in one direction and causes it to shrink in another. Cofounded in 1992 by Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT, LIGO is a joint project between scientists at MIT, Caltech, and many other colleges and universities. Many scientists have predicted that this discovery is nearly guaranteed to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016.

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. Gravitational waves were discovered by physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, 100 years ago.

The Reddit user continued: “Now some people built a really sensitive measuring thing that uses lasers to see them, and they just proved that their device works by seeing ripples from a really big splash”.