A Cheat’s Guide To Gravitational Waves

“This is giving us more sound-like information about the universe”, he explained.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time, which carry information about space phenomena never before observed. The best example could be a binary system, here a pair of stars or black holes orbit their common centre of mass.

At a press conference, David Reitze, executive director of LIGO said: “We have detected gravitational waves”. “It’s a confirmation that we know how gravity works in these very extreme conditions of colliding black holes”. The ripples LIGO detected are based on the merging of two black holes, Reitze said. A huge energy blast then emanated throughout the universe in a fashion similar to how Einstein had theorized when he came up with his theory of relativity.

Sixty Indian scientists from nine Indian institutes were part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration that is involved in research and analysis of data generated from the detector.

As per the Huffingtonpost.in report, Sanjeev Dhurandhar, a scientist with the Inter-University Centre of Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, had detected the gravitational waves nearly thirty years ago before the worldwide scientific community. Those kinks are sort of like what a gravitational wave does.

“More than a billion years ago, the two collided at half the speed of light”.

Albert Einstein predicted the presence of gravitational waves in 1915 with his general theory of relativity-putting forth the idea that space and time can bend and warp. “This is remarkable; up until now we’ve been deaf”. The results have told scientists how black holes combine: they orbit each other at up to 250 rotations per second before a final collision. Discovery of gravitational waves would confirm their existence. 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.

In the first two runs of the animation, the sound-wave frequencies exactly match the frequencies of the gravitational waves.