Stephen Hawking Hails Gravitational Wave Discovery

Slightly under a 100 years after Albert Einstein propounded his famous General Theory of Relativity (GTR), evidence supporting a rather elusive implication of the theory was found. The US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has published data on the recording of the first observed gravitational wave. It is not that we just look up and see anymore, like we always have – we actually can listen to the universe now.

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.

“Tianqin will likely collect more information about the phenomenon, as a larger black hole may be detected in space compared with one detected on the ground”, said Chen.

The waves were registered on September 14, 2015 by LIGO observatory detectors in the states of Louisiana and Washington.

About 3 times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second – with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe.

To get behind the scenes of this major discovery, The Kavli Foundation hosted an exclusive roundtable discussion on Thursday with three key LIGO researchers, who are all part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI).

For 100 years, physicists have been searching for the gravity waves that Einstein predicted should exist.

The waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, set off in the course of gravitational interactions.

“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.

“The area of the final black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the initial black holes as predicted by my black hole area theorem”, he said.

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