Years Later Einstein is Proven Right!

Scientists confirmed Einstein’s theory with the groundbreaking discovery, announced today at the National Press Club, that gravitational waves were detected after a collision of a pair of unusual black holes.

Researchers at the $620M Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States said on Thursday that they had detected minute ripples in the structure of space-time for the first time.

Two types of very massive and dense celestial objects, neutron stars and black holes, have proven tough to study but could offer ideal subjects if observations of gravitational waves are possible. The mass, in this case it was two black holes colliding, stirs space and time, generating “gravitational waves” that ripple out from the collision at the speed of light.

Gravitational waves were discovered by physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, 100 years ago.

A passing wave essentially stretches space in one direction and causes it to shrink in another.

They travel to earth much like ripples travel outward across a pond.

“They’re waves, like light or any other kind of electromagnetic radiation, except here what’s “waving” is space and time itself”, said NASA astrophysicist Ira Thorpe, with the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the Virgo group collaboration, research published today in Physical Review Letters reveals findings that verify Einstein’s theory, according to the University.

“A measure of its significance is that even the source of the wave – two black holes in close orbit, each tens of times heavier than the Sun, which then collide violently – has never been observed before, and could not have been observed by any other method”.

“It’s one thing to know soundwaves exist, but it’s another to actually hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”, said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who wasn’t part of the discovery team.

“This detection from LIGO is one of the biggest physics discoveries of this century”, he said.

Because the Louisiana monitor recorded the event 7 milliseconds before the Washington state detector, scientists say that the explosion came from the Southern Hemisphere.

“There are plans to develop this technology and in particular to open new detectors at new places on the earth”, says Pontzen. Kip Thorne, Caltech’s professor of Theoretical Physics, enthusiastically explained, “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 spacetime”. Before 1965 you could have said, ‘Oh, we live in a pretty boring universe. “When I was an undergraduate, we were simply trying to get over the hurdle of being able to make observations”. These are black holes.