Scientists finally confirm gravitational waves

The discovery of gravitational waves is seen as a major breakthrough in the field of science.

Nearly immediately after turning on equipment that had taken 25 years of perfecting, scientists detected the gravitational waves caused by collision of two black holes – one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller – a full 1.3 billion years ago.

According to the National Geographic, the LIGO is a mirror-based experiment and the signal it received is characteristic of the expected sound of the death and merging of two black holes. The incredibly powerful event, which released 50 times more energy than all the stars in the observable universe, lasted only fractions of a second. “My research interest since 1987 has been in the detection/observation of gravitational waves, their data analysis and the modelling of gravitational wave detectors”, Dhurandhar was quoted as saying.

Gravitational waves – a major prediction of Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity – that carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that can not be obtained from elsewhere, were detected on September 14, 2015 by both of the twin (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, expressed joy over the historic detection of gravitational waves and lauded the role of Indian scientists in the project. Scientists at the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) have detected the gravitational waves from this vast, larger black hole being born.

Explainer: What are gravitational waves?

“Well, a long time ago, a really smart guy named Einstein said that stars and planets and stuff should make ripples in space, and he used some really cool math to explain why he thought that”. These cosmic ripples speed up in frequency and rises in amplitude as the black holes merge, then quickly die down once the union is complete, creating a kind of cosmic chirp.

Black Hole expert Prof.

This discovery, apart from vindicating Einstein, is the first proof that binary black-hole systems-the existence of which was always treated as a theoretical probability-are materially real.