Einstein’s gravitational wave discovery: What others are saying

Yes, it confirms a 100-year-old prediction by Albert Einstein, but what is it good for?

The two black holes, each 30 times as massive as the Sun, orbited each other, then spiralled together, ultimately colliding and merging together.

This landmark discovery is the last missing puzzle piece to Einstein’s doubted theory of general relativity, thereby cementing his legacy.

Professor Kerr, whose theory is widely known in physics as the Kerr vacuum, credited fellow pioneers in the field, including noted U.S. physicist Joseph Webber, who was trying to detect gravitational waves back in the 1960s.

“The universe is stranger than any kind of fiction we could imagine”, he says.

The gravitational waves, which carry information not only about their origins but the nature of gravity, were detected on September 14, 2015 by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors.

A century ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity, and new data from the National Science Foundation has confirmed they do indeed exist. You can see graphs of what they observed, below. The instruments are so sensitive that they will also detect a truck rumbling down the street, a storm brewing in the distance, or a dropped book in the control room. 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.

The problem was these gravitational waves were thought to be very weak and nearly impossible to detect, until now.

“The remarkable fact is that the gravitational wave is stretching the space between the mirrors”, said Jonah Kanner, a research scientists at the LIGO laboratory at Caltech.

During the final fraction of a second, the two black holes collide at almost half the speed of light and form a single more massive black hole, converting a portion of the combined black holes’ mass to energy, according to Einstein’s formula Emc2. Some said this is bigger. It’ll allow scientists to explore the universe in a whole new way.

“What it means is we now have a way to look at our universe”. When he heard about the wave, he said, “it was just sort of a sigh of happiness”. It would also give us a better picture of how the universe came to be: We’d be able to see the birth of our universe.

This is a way of seeing the Universe with gravity rather than light, which is a completely new way of understanding what is going on in the Universe around us. And I should point out that this is only the beginning, that we’re actually – there are projects that are undergoing in Japan.

We’re excited to hear more chirps, but for now we’ve got our new text message tone picked out.