Stephen Hawking hails discovery of gravitational waves

The gravitational waves, defined as ripples in space-time, is said to be created by the merging of two black holes.

The scientific milestone was achieved using a pair of giant laser detectors in the United States, located in Louisiana and Washington state, capping a decades-long quest to find these waves.

September 14, 2015 marked the first time when the scientists detected the gravitational waves. In 1916, Einstein proposed the existence of gravitational waves in his ground-breaking general theory of relativity.

“This discovery is a very big achievement for science, it basically opens up newer horizons for us to look at the universe”. Bigger than the discovery of the subatomic Higgs boson particle (i.e., the god particle), and it has been suggested this discovery is comparable only to “Galileo taking up the telescope and looking at the planets”.

The eLISA Consortium believes that a spaceborne low-frequency gravitational wave observatory is the ideal tool to make progress in our understanding of the Universe.

“When objects with mass accelerate, such as when two black holes spiral towards each other, they send waves along the curved space-time around them at the speed of light, like ripples on a pond”.

“With this discovery, we humans are embarking on a marvelous new quest, the quest to explore the warped side of the universe objects and phenomena that are made from warped space time. It had many predictions and they were all discovered to be exactly correct, but this one was elusive”, says Drury University Physics Professor Gregory Ojakangas.

The new black hole, with three suns worth of mass has now been turned into an energy – gravitational waves.

How to catch a gravity wave Einstein predicted gravitational waves 100 years ago.

The sound of two black holes colliding ends with a middle C note, according to physicists. Well, once again, Einstein was right, proving that another one of the concepts in his General Theory is correct.

Even Einstein didn’t know if gravitational waves, which he predicted were weak, could ever be measured by people on Earth, making today’s announcement huge for the scientific community.

The only direct application that can be foreseen is in the field of astronomy, where scientists will be able to tune in to space-time distortions from various periods in the history of the universe.