LIGO Hanford scientists celebrate while looking ahead to future discoveries

The scientists said that because gravitational waves are so radically different from electromagnetic waves they expect them to reveal big surprises about the universe.

A little contribution was made by Goa during the International Conference on Gravitation and Cosmology, ICGC, 1987 when cosmologists and experts in gravitational physics from all around the world had assembled in Panaji for five days. That will cause some of the light to warble out through an exit called a dark port in synchrony with undulations of the wave.

Gravitational waves experience no such barriers, meaning they can offer a wealth of additional information.

“But before that the only way actually, precisely because gravity is un-attenuated, is by Gravitational Waves and I think this one of the great things that science looks forward to in the future, that we would be able to witness the birth of the Universe” said Prof Bala Iyer. It is more of a mathematical proof than a physical proof.

In search for real gravitational wave signals, scientists had to damp out irrelevant vibrations caused by noise sources, which is no easier than identifying a Morse code tapped on a wine glass at a grand party bustling with noise.

This is an epochal discovery.

The gravitational wave detected on September 14, 2015, is now known to have been produced by the merger of two black holes about 1.3 billion years ago.

How scientists finally reached this milestone?

One may be tempted to fancy that this discovery has suddenly elevated Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (GTR) from the status of being a mere “electrostatic” effect to that of dynamic “electromagnetism” where the effect propagates like a wave with a finite speed (of light). That distortion could yield clues as to the mass of a hypothesized subatomic particle associated with quantum gravity, the graviton.

Gravitational waves are one of the many predictions of how the Universe behaves according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Gravity as an idea, and even a name, predates Newton. “The same happens with gravitational waves”, said Gonzalez. But it was just the dawn of space age and their idea went unnoticed. And the timing of these “pulses” can tell us if gravitational waves are present. But there was no confirmation of this claim.

“We’re actually hearing them go thump in the night”, Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Matthew Evans said.

60 scientists from the above mentioned institutions have contributed in this significant discovery. Taylor and Russell Hulse discovered in 1974 a binary system composed of a pulsar in orbit around a neutron star. The surprising slowing down of the neutron star was attributed to gravitational radiation.

At the moment of collision, the binary black holes released an enormous amount of energy, notes Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and co-founder of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which recorded the waves that the collision generated. But only in 1990 NSF sanctioned $250 million to the LIGO experiment. “100 years feels like a lifetime but over the course of scientific exploration it’s not that long”, Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, said at the Columbia gathering.

The team has analysed the data from gravitational wave detectors in the U.S. This facility partners with LIGO.

“Gravitational waves, sort of at a fundamental level, are very similar” to a pond, explained Reitze. The gravitational astronomy group at IUCAA and some other Indian centers have contributed to various relevant research as part of the global LIGO team. This discovery has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of the forces of gravity, time and space the most basic of elements that impact our everyday lives. During 2010 to 2015 LIGO detectors were upgraded raising their capacity and sensitivity.

By 1919, solar eclipses were sufficiently well-understood and documented that normal circumstances would not have warranted an expedition to such a far-flung place just to take a few pictures. However, the discipline of science demanded lots of checks, crosschecks and verifications.