Meaning: What the sound of colliding black holes has been described as

“Instead of having artificial lasers travel through vacuum tubes, we actually have radio pulses from pulsars that are traveling through the vacuum of space”, says Maura McLaughlin, an astrophysicist with NANOGrav – the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves.

Chen Yanbei of LIGO, said Tianqin is different from the research by the USA ground-based observatory in that it will observe the waves from space. Scientists finally decided on two sites for LIGO in 1992 – Washington and Louisiana – but construction started 2 years later.

The research, by the LIGO Collaboration, was published Thursday in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The two laser instruments, which work in unison, are known as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Once a signal is identified, scientists can determine what caused it by checking it against simulations of wave forms. It matches the waveform predicted by general relativity for the inspiral and merger of a pair of black holes and the ringdown of the resulting single black hole. The source lies at a luminosity distance of 410+160-180Mpc corresponding to a redshift z=0.09+0.03-0.04.

“Gravitational waves provide a completely new way at looking at the universe”. All uncertainties define 90% credible intervals.

Take a break from the muck and mire of the presidential campaign and consider the wonders of the universe, the accomplishments of scientists working as a team, and the century-old brilliance of Albert Einstein. Although scientists have long believed gravitational waves to exist, there had been no confirmation or proof of their existence till now.

As a member of the LIGO research team of the University of Oregon, Dipankar concentrated on finding whether the wave came from the Earth or from the collision of the two black holes joining into one.

“Tianqin is likely to collect better information, as a larger black hole may be detected from space than the one detected from the ground”, said Chen.

Executive director of the LIGO project told BBC that “we have detected gravitational waves”. He also predicted black holes, though only as a mathematical construct.

Just how hard was it to detect? And when they get to the Earth, the waves pass through, and contract and expand the planet as the wave goes by.

This miniscule stretching of spacetime was possible because of ultraprecise rulers. Where the arms meet, the two beams can overlap. The beauty of gravitational waves is that, while weak, they penetrate anything in their path.

The idea was that the waves are like ripples in space, caused by some of the violent and energetic processes in the Universe.

The fact that two interferometers, 3,000 kilometers apart, had the same reading, and that an extrapolation of the measurement over five additional seconds did not fit the pattern, suggested it was a gravitational wave. To spot such tiny displacements, however, scientists must damp out vibrations such as the rumble of seismic waves, the thrum of traffic, and the crashing of waves on distant coastlines. On Sept. 14, 2015, at 5:51 a.m. ET, an alarm went off in Louisiana. They orbit one other, circling, coming closer, speeding up.

“There are gravitational waves that are produced by bigger black holes, galaxies colliding and those gravitational waves take minutes to hours and those would be detected by a space detector which we hope flies sometime in the next decade”. When they merged, three solar masses radiated away, she said. The surprising slowing down of the neutron star was attributed to gravitational radiation. “I have met the Chief Secretary of Karnataka and others in many States … they are quite favourable to it [hosting a detector]” said Tarun Souradeep, a key co-ordinator of INDIGO and physicist at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA). According to media reports, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh are among the states shortlisted for the experiment. All these efforts have now led to India spending ten billion rupees to build a gravitational wave detector and join the network of such detectors across the globe.