Einstein’s gravitational waves detected from two merging black holes

The scientists said that the discovery heralds a new era of “gravitational wave astronomy” where discoveries are waiting to be unfolded.

“As the black holes spiral closer and closer in together, the frequency of the gravitational waves increases”, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) said.

100 years after Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity, a team of about 1,000 scientists have proven his prediction of gravitational waves.

“Up until now we have been deaf to the universe”.

The presence of Gravitational waves is a momentous discovery because this opens the universe to completely new investigations.

Gravitational waves detected at last!

A visualisation of gravitational waves. The original conversion to sound waves evokes the thump of a heartbeat, while an adjusted version created to better accommodate the range of human hearing could be mistaken for a drop of water falling into a bucket.

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.

About a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves but they have never been observed until now.

These particular black holes emitted about as much gravitational energy as three of our suns.

This theory was also almost proved by Eddington in the year 1919 when it was discovered that the light from the stars bent as it made its way around the sun and when this theory was proved, the gravitational waves due to the distortion in the space-time continuum was also closely proved. But using LIGO’s Interferometer, scientists managed to detect these tiny measurements of spacetime stretching in one direction and shrinking in another, which is evidence of gravitational waves passing.

Hawking said the findings confirm his theoretical work from decades ago, including the claim that the area of the merged black hole should be greater than the sum of the areas of black holes that were merged.

Markarian 231, a binary black hole found in the centre of the nearest quasar host galaxy to Earth, is seen in a NASA illustration released on August 27, 2015.