Einstein’s gravitational waves detected in landmark discovery

“We are going to be listening to it”.

Einstein has proven to be right again!

The idea that gravitational waves come from non-other than Albert Einstein and his published work on the Theory of General Relativity in 1915.

Analysis of the waves suggests they originated from a system of two black holes, each with the mass of about 30 Suns, that gravitationally drew closer to each other.

Alastair Heptonstall, 37, is a scientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and played a key role in upgrading gravitational wave detectors that paved the way for the breakthrough, developing silica fibres for the intricate device. The event reported by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration is due to the collision of two black holes, that eventually merged into one larger black hole about 1.3 billion years ago.

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. While it may be hard to grasp how this information will affect people’s’ everyday lives, Hendry points out that in addition to knowledge for knowledge’s sake, scientific discovery offers a number of unintended, positive consequences.

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. “We did it”, said David Reitze, LIGO’s Executive Director. They spread across space, minutely distorting everything in their path.

The discovery, made by the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory in the US, confirms the last outstanding prediction made in Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

“We can hear gravitational waves”, González said.

“All of this technology wasn’t available to Einstein”, Weiss said.

Lawrence Krauss, a Theoretical physicist at the Arizona State University, described the finding as “a huge milestone”.

“As we open a new window into astronomy, we may see things we’ve never seen before”, Reitze said.

Experiments to detect gravitational waves began in the 1960s, however it was only three years earlier that the actual physical reality of gravitational waves was debated and their existence considered to be true.

Syracuse University physics professor Peter Saulson has worked on the project for 34 years, beginning with MIT physicist Rainer Weiss who had been working since the 1970s. Hinting at the dawn of a new era in physics, they believe that the discovery will go a long way in our understanding of the universe.