Hawking hails gravitational wave discovery

For the first time scientists have directly detected gravitational waves, and have first observed ripples in the fabric of space-time forseen by Einstein a century ago.

“We can now study black holes and other violent events in our universe – like mergers of very massive and dense stars – directly”, says Dejan Stojkovic, UB associate professor of physics, who has done theoretical research related to black holes. More than a billion years ago – LIGO estimates about 1.3 billion – the two collided at half the speed of light.

Yesterday’s announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, a phenomenon that Einstein predicted, but which he thought humans could never detect, rocked the scientific world.

Hawking said the breakthrough tallied with predictions he made more than 40 years ago at Cambridge University.

The waves were unleashed by the collision of the black holes – extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by the Jewish, Germany-born physicist.

Fred Raab knew back in the ’80s that he had to decide: look for these gravitational waves, or do something else with his life?

What even are gravitational waves? The black holes were 29 and 36 times larger than the mass of the sum and they gave off gravitational waves as they spiraled into one another. The National Science Foundation, Caltech and MIT have confirmed the existence of gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime, Engadget reports. It occurs during collision of black holes, explosion of stars or merging of neutron star and any extreme events that cause space time to warp, expand and contract.

The new discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a group of more than 1,000 scientists from universities around the United States as well as in 14 other countries.

Albert Einstein first theorised on gravitational ripples, in 1916 as part of his theory of general relativity. Since them, scientists were trying to spot these waves, but they tasted success in finding proof about 60 years after the legend physicist’s death.

“You can’t buy low-noise, high-power devices”, said Volker Quetschke, UTRGV assistant professor of physics, adding LIGO was defining state-of-the-art in the field.