Breakthrough: Scientists detect Einstein-predicted ripples

Said Kip Thorne, an emeritus professor at Caltech and member of the team: “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”. “The skies will never be the same”.

The waves were unleashed by the collision of the black holes, one of them 29 times the mass of the sun and the other 36 times the solar mass, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth, the researchers said. In 1992 the National Science Foundation green-lighted LIGO to build two facilities, in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington.

We’re excited to hear more chirps, but for now we’ve got our new text message tone picked out. “They were very secretive about it”, he announced at Thursday’s press conference held on the Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) campus. She is a physicist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and spokesperson for the LIGO collaboration.

But in 1993, two Princeton scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993 for discovering a new type of pulsar that offered indirect proof of the existence of gravitational waves.

Some physicists said the finding is as big a deal as the 2012 discovery of the subatomic Higgs boson, known as the “God particle”.

Some scientists likened the breakthrough to the moment Galileo took up a telescope to look at the planets. Detecting the waves validates Einstein’s relatively theory and gives scientists a new way to study the universe.

Astronomers have been studying gravity for centuries now, but our ability to test gravity has been restricted to small deviations from Newtonian physics.

Predicted over 100 years ago by Albert Einstein, gravitational waves are ripples in space-time.

The gravitational waves – ripples in space-time – were created by the merging of two black holes, Reitze said. Now we have seen it both in computer simulations and in observations with this gravitational wave detection. “We’re getting a signal which arrives at Earth, and we can put it on a speaker, and we can hear these black holes go, “Whoop”.

In this case, the crashing of the two black holes stretched and squished Earth so that it was “jiggling like Jell-O”, but in a tiny, nearly imperceptible way, said David Reitze, LIGO’s executive director. “This is just a start”.

The message said: “I think we are in trouble now”, he recalled.

An enthusiastic Reitze said that the LIGO scientific team had waited for months to detect the elusive waves predicted by Einstein. The greatest scientific mind of the 20th century later doubted himself and questioned in the 1930s whether they really do exist, but by the 1960s scientists had concluded they probably do, Ashtekar said.

LIGO technically wasn’t even operating in full science mode; it was still in the testing phase when the signal came through, Reitze said.

“It’s as if we had an enormous hearing aide, which let us pick up the sounds that the universe has been producing – we just have been deaf to these sounds up until now”, Evans says.

The existence of gravitational waves was first demonstrated in observations of a binary system composed of a pulsar orbiting a neutron star. Ajith Parmeshwaran, an Indian scientist associated with the discovery, said, “All this while, we have also made sure that this distortion is not due to any other aspect but gravitational waves“. But after years with no luck, scientists realized they had to build a much more sensitive system, which was turned on last September.

The simplest way to grasp the idea of gravitational waves is to picture all of space-time as a big, stretchy trampoline. Essentially, LIGO detects waves that pull and compress the entire Milky Way galaxy “by the width of your thumb”, said team member Chad Hanna of Pennsylvania State University.

Each location shoots a laser beam down two tubes about 2.5 miles long. The beams are used to monitor the distance between mirrors precisely positioned at the ends of the arms.

For Blair, it is enough to know that he and his team, which includes physicist son Carl, played an integral role in a scientific discovery that he believes will be “remembered for 1000 years”.

The research, by the Ligo Collaboration, has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Northwestern University Experts Explain Discovery of Gravitational Waves from Northwestern News on Vimeo. Each of these gravitational wave windows is sort of like going from optical to X-rays to radio waves where we different aspects of the universe with each of those tools.