Gravitational waves: Science ‘discovery of century’ explained perfectly in one paragraph

Rainer Weiss, professor of physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the scientists who originally proposed LIGO as a means of detecting gravitational waves in the 1980s. Similar gravitational waves have probably passed through the Earth before, but this time, someone was watching.

Professor Gabriela Gonzalez said, “We can hear the gravitational waves, we can hear the universe”.

The scientific community is losing it’s shit rn.

The theory showed that gravity is caused by objects with mass, like planets and stars, warping space and time.

For the first time, scientists say we can hear the universe like never before in the form of ripples called gravitational waves.

It took supercomputers to measure it, but what’s even more sublime is that Einstein conceived of this phenomenon 100 years ago and that the waves match his equation.

This created the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein. It’s not that we just look up and see anymore, like we always have – we actually can listen to the universe now. 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.

Their existence was predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity a century ago, but until now, no instruments were sensitive enough to detect them.

In a breakthrough announcement, scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) said that they have finally detected the elusive gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Stephen Hawking applauded the historic discovery, saying it could potentially “revolutionise astronomy”.

LIGO is described in a statement as “a system of two identical detectors” – one located in Livingston, Louisiana, the other in Hanford, Washington – “carefully constructed to detect incredibly tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves”. Gravitational waves pass through everything, so the result traveled through the universe for that time before reaching Earth.