Einstein, A Hunch And Decades Of Work: How Scientists Found Gravitational Waves

UAH’s Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) was tasked with analyzing a potentially interesting piece of the data and figure out what the gravitational wave signal actually looked like.

But with this groundbreaking discovery-one that was featured on TV and in print all over the world-came a major design challenge: how to explain a complicated theory, one that took decades to prove, to the general public? The waves were created by the merging of two black holes, just as Einstein predicted, as reported by CNN. They collapsed into each other, and the massive collision sent shock waves – gravitational waves rippling in space-time itself – that pulsed out across the universe at the speed of light. The existence of gravitational waves was first hypothesized by Albert Einstein in the year of 1916, as part of his ground-breaking general theory of relativity.

Physicist Szabi Marka, a LIGO collaborator based at Columbia University, gushed about the coming scientific revolution to a crowded Columbia lecture hall in NY. “The Universe is stranger than any kind of fiction we could imagine”, he says. Physicists have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. The gravitational waves described by Reitze is made of one black hole with the mass of 29 suns while the other was the equivalent of 36 suns. Unlike Isaac Newton, Einstein did not think of gravity as a force but rather as a disturbance or distortion in spacetime, caused by bodies as they moved through it. It is this distortion that provides the attraction between large objects. At the end of a year ago the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the LISA Pathfinder to test the technologies for detecting gravitational waves in space.

MAKING WAVES Here’s how gravitational waves work, and how scientists detected them for the first time from two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light years away. “We can hear the universe”. In fact, this caused so much doubt to Einstein regarding the prospect of gravitational waves being ever detected that he twice declared them “non-existent” before reverting to his original position.

The black hole collision was recorded by two widely separated Ligo facilities in the US. “So we have opened a new way of listening to a broadcasting channel which will allow us to discover phenomena we have never seen before”, he said.