The Discovery of Gravitational Waves

Before confirmation of the first direct observation of gravitational waves rippled through the world, the search had already begun for visible signs of the event that generated the powerful waves in space.

“Historic detection of gravitational waves opens up new frontier for understanding of universe”. They’re called gravitational waves, and their discovery changed astronomy and physics forever.

The supercomputer will assist researchers at the UWA-operated Australian International Gravitational Observatory (AIGO) at Gingin, north Perth.

The two LIGO observatories (Laser Interferometer Gravitation Wave Observatory) in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, measure, using their two arms that are each 4,000 metres in length, the smallest wavelength differences with an interferometer and make it possible to detect gravitational waves in a specially developed process. Members of the LIGO team announced last week that detected gravitational waves from the collision and merger of two black holes that were each roughly 30 times the size of the sun. The results were disappointing, but could help future attempts at imaging the source of gravitational waves.

The waves came from the collision and merging of two black holes, and scientists were able to transform the signal into an audible chirp.

Space News reported that, this news of binary-pair detection is extremely significant for astrophysicists, but it was somewhat eclipsed by the simple fact that the Large Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) had detected gravitational waves at all. On Sept. 14, 2015, twin state of the art interferometry observatories known as LIGO finally detected the phenomena.

“China will either take a share of the European Space Agency’s eLISA project, to share equipment with them, or send our own wave-detection satellite group into space to work as a parallel project to eLISA’s one”, said Hu Wenrui. If gravitational waves were present at the time when the CMB was born, they should leave behind a unique swirly pattern — a curling in the polarisation of the light — dubbed “B modes”. “We’ve found black holes that we didn’t expect to be so massive… but just as we have discovered them we have many more questions to answer”, she says.