Breakthrough: Scientists detect Einstein’s gravity ripples

They merged some 1.3 billion light years from Earth. “Now we have gravitational waves we are going to have a whole new picture of the universe, of the stuff that doesn’t emit light – dark matter, black holes”, he said. General relativity predicts that ripples in the fabric of spacetime radiate energy away from such catastrophes.

These ripples stretch and compress spacetime and could, in theory, be picked up here on Earth.

But there comes a point where we can’t peer any further back in time because there’s no light to be had at all. More than 90 universities and research institutes in the LSC develop detector technology and analyze data; approximately 250 students are strong contributing members of the collaboration.

Sensitivity is crucial because the stretching and squeezing of space-time by gravitational waves is incredibly tiny. Because of this difference in distance, the recombining waves are no longer perfectly aligned and therefore don’t cancel out.

Reitze described how, on September 14 of previous year, a tiny blip of a signal was detected seven milliseconds apart by massive observatories in Louisiana and Washington. Gravitational waves may now provide a tool with which to probe these mysteries in a similar way that X-rays and MRI have allowed us to probe the human body.

By studying computer simulations of astrophysical phenomena, scientists can figure out what type of signals to expect from various gravitational wave sources.

But because the waves are so hard to detect, the LIGO researchers had to look for something that would make a massive wave, such as the collision of two black holes. The LIGO team is infamous for secretly introducing ersatz gravitational wave signals into the data stream to test the experiment’s analysis procedures.

“That’s the chirp we’ve been looking for”, said Louisiana State University physicist Gabriela Gonzalez, scientific spokeswoman for the LIGO team.

Detecting gravitational waves is so hard that when Einstein theorized them, he figured scientists would never be able to hear them. However, gravitational waves must always have been there because of the size and power of the big bang.

The existence of gravitational waves was first demonstrated in the 1970s and 1980s by Joseph Taylor, Jr., and colleagues. Gravitational waves would be like ripples that emanate from a pebble thrown in a pond. Here are a few other ongoing and future projects. For nearly a decade LIGO facilities failed to detect any gravitational waves. A third LIGO detector, this one in India, is scheduled to join the search in 2019. Researchers have been lobbying the European Space Agency to put a LIGO-like detector in space – the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna – sometime in the 2030s. “The last time anything like this happened was in 1888 when Heinrich Hertz detected the radio waves that had been predicted by James Clerk Maxwell’s field-equations of electromagnetism in 1865”, added Durham University physicist Tom McLeish.

To pick up the relatively low-frequency hum of colliding supermassive black holes, researchers are turning to pulsars. Mobile communication is entirely reliant on radio waves.

“Gravitational waves are akin to sound waves that travelled through space at the speed of light”, said David Blair of the University of Western Australia.

When they eventually merged, the single black hole that remained was 62 times the mass of the sun – three solar masses lighter than the two original black holes combined.

Gravitational waves released in the wake of the Big Bang would have left a mark on the cosmic microwave background, or CMB.

How did they detect the waves?

What can we learn from gravitational waves?

She said: “It’s monumental – like Galileo using the telescope for the first time”. Before that moment we knew little about the stars and planets. Gravitational waves are a new way of seeing the cosmos. Building on work published in 1905, the theory of general relativity tied together that what we commonly consider to be separate entities – space and time – into what is now called “space-time”. “We will not only understand it, we will “see” it. It’s the most fascinating thing I can imagine”.