Waves: Scientists Finally Prove Albert Einstein’s Theory

LIGO’s two detectors – one in Louisiana and the other in Washington state – recorded the space-time distortions caused by gravitational waves that were produced 1.3 billion years ago during the merger of two black holes.

“It opens a new window on the universe, like the invention of the telescope or discovery of radio waves from space”, he said.

To get the unforgettable sound, the researchers working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) scientific collaboration used light signals collected at their detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, on September 14, 2015, and converted them into sound waves. Physicists surprised science community on Thursday by announcing that they have successfully detected the ripples in spacetime that Einstein first predicted a century ago. The discovery by the LIGO Laboratory confirmed his predictions down to a T. Now, the scientist is just excited on what the gravitational wave discovery could do for astrophysics.

Decades after the departure of genius theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, scientists said he was right about gravitational waves.

In the first two runs of the animation, the sound-wave frequencies exactly match the frequencies of the gravitational waves. Discovery of these waves would help us improve our knowledge of the universe around us, as it would allow us to peek into areas that electromagnetic waves were unable to permeate. The ripple created was about a billionth of the width of an atom when it reached Earth, so small that Einstein thought it would be too subtle to ever be detected.

He praised the important role the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Brownsville campus played in helping advance LIGO technology to the current level. “This discovery is the first detection of a black hole binary system and the first observation of black holes merging”, Hawking told BBC News. A gravitational wave would be a ripple in the fabric of space and time.

According to Li, Tianqin has already made progress on some key technologies and will be carried out in four stages over the next 15 to 20 years, including the last step of launching three high-orbit satellites to detect gravitational waves.