The US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced its groundbreaking discovery of gravitational waves on Thursday, as foreseen by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity a century ago. In fact, this caused so much doubt to Einstein regarding the prospect of gravitational waves being ever detected that he twice declared them “non-existent” before reverting to his original position.
Analysis of the gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime – suggests they originated from a system of two black holes, each with the mass of about 30 Suns, that gravitationally drew closer to each other.
According to Li, Tianqin has already made progress on some key technologies and will be carried out in four stages over the next 15 to 20 years, including the last step of launching three high-orbit satellites to detect gravitational waves. So when a big object moves and accelerates, you have two objects, orbiting around one another, it’s creating these ripples that travel outward, and that’s what a gravitational wave is. But what are these ripples in space?
When they merged into one super black hole, gravitational waves spiraled away at the speed of light.
“It’s a tremendously important discovery”.
“The area of the final black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the initial black holes as predicted by my black hole area theorem”, he said.
“This is something completely different, these are gravitational waves that by the time they get to Earth, they’re very hard to pick up”.
While the two huge detectors are in the United States, it took 1,000 scientists working together to make the discovery possible. “So this is a spectacular new result for astronomy”, said John Mather, a senior scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Reuters reported. Now, the detection of these undulations has changed how we see the universe. The famous physicist Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these waves 100 years ago.