Listen to two black holes colliding in deep space

Both waves speed up at the same rate, a property which is caused by the increasingly fast rotation of the two black holes as they approach their imminent collision.

Einstein predicted the sound nearly exactly a century ago.

When two black holes collided some 1.3 billion years ago, the joining of those two great masses sent forth a wobble that hurtled through space and reached Earth on September 14, 2015, when it was picked up by sophisticated instruments, researchers announced.

Nine Indian institutes also actively participated in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Gravity waves travel in waves. Eventually they might allow us to look into those same odd parts of the universe, giving us clues about how it began.

Astronomers have detected gravitational waves from two merging black holes located more than a billion light years from Earth.

MIT physicist Matthew Evans said, “We’re actually hearing them go thump in the night”.

Gravitational waves sent out from a pair of colliding black holes have been converted to sound waves, as heard in this animation.

Astrobites: Opening Our Ears to the Universe: LIGO observes Gravitational Waves! The ability to directly detect gravitational waves has been compared to a deaf person suddenly gaining the ability to hear sound.

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. It is now that the researchers have confirmed about its existence.

But this wasn’t just some little “chirp”. This week, however, we’ve come a long way in understanding gravity and its impact on the universe, and gained further appreciation for modern science and the incredible gifts of a legendary scientist. “The skies will never be the same”.

“Apart from testing (Albert Einstein’s theory of) General Relativity, we could hope to see black holes through the history of the Universe”, Hawking told BBC.

Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Hannover director professor Karsten Danzmann said: “Scientists have been looking for gravitational waves for decades, but we have only now been able to achieve the incredibly precise technologies needed to pick up these very, very faint echoes from across the universe”. For starters, now we know how to find graviational waves, a new type of cosmic signal that could open up an entirely new field of astronomy, according to the report.