You may listen to stars now via Gravitational wave!

Scientists announced Thursday they have finally detected gravitational waves, proving Einstein right again.

The waves were the result of a collision between two black holes 30 times as massive as the sun, located 1.3 billion light years from earth. This discovery has ushered in an awesome new era of astronomy.

Scientists have declared the discovery of gravitational waves as a breakthrough of the century, a prediction Albert Einstein made in his 1916 Theory of Relativity.

“Gravitational waves are literally ripples in the curvature of space-time that are caused by collisions of heavy and compact objects like black holes and neutron stars”, said Abhay Ashtekar, director of Penn State University’s Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos.

The idea that gravitational waves come from non-other than Albert Einstein and his published work on the Theory of General Relativity in 1915.

LIGO researchers observed the merger of a pair of black holes through a transient gravitational-wave signal, more than a billion light years from Earth.

Scientists heard the sound of the black holes colliding as a “chirp” lasting one-fifth of a second. LIGO physicists were able to detect a gravitational wave signal in September 2015 and confirmed their findings early this morning.

Because these waves were highly dependent on movement, scientists, including Einstein himself, were confident that these should be observable in abundance in space.

Twenty years later, they started building two LIGO detectors in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, and they were turned on in 2001.

Columbia University physicist Marka, who’s been working on the project for more than a decade, said the discovery will open up new horizons, including direct tests of Einstein’s general theory.

For now, Reitze says this discovery is as significant as any. “The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionize astronomy”. Eventually they might allow us to look into those same unusual parts of the universe, giving us clues about how it began.

Gravitational wave astrophysicist Deirdre Shoemaker helped lead the school’s researchers.

“What’s really exciting is what comes next”, said Reitze at the announcement.

“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”, added Thorne. “This is as dramatic an event from space-time as we expected to happen in the universe, but at no point was anything traveling through time”.

This is the first time black holes have been directly detected.