‘Gravitational waves detected 100 years after Einstein’s prediction’

Literally, gravitational waves are ripples in space-time’s curvature that are caused by collisions of massive and compact cosmic objects like black holes and neutron stars. Early Thursday, the National Science Foundation revealed they finally recorded proof of a phenomena Einstein predicted 100 years ago in his theory of relativity.

“Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn’t hear the music”, said Columbia University astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka, a member of the discovery team.

Physics grad Grant Meadors ’08 is part of the team that first detected a gravitational wave.

“The remarkable fact is that the gravitational wave is stretching the space between the mirrors”, said Jonah Kanner, a research scientists at the LIGO laboratory at Caltech.

As per the scientists who made the announcement, the waves which were discovered triggered by two blackholes colliding to form a larger blackhole nearly 1.3 billion years ago. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves”. The phrase has been on everyone’s lips. “To describe an event so remote in time and space and so far away from our own experience is really incredible”.

The US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced its groundbreaking discovery of gravitational waves on Thursday, as foreseen by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity a century ago.

“This discovery comes at the culmination of decades of instrument research and development, through a world-wide effort of thousands of researchers”, the scientists said. “In this case, we’re actually getting to hear black holes merging”.

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

LIGO uses 4km-long pipes to detect the waves, 3000 kilometres apart, in Washington and Louisiana.

Former director of IUCAA, Ajit Kembhavi, said the Indian scientific community contributed greatly in developing methods for analysing the data received from the two detectors in America. However, in actuality, the mirrors DID NOT move, the space between and around them did!