Exciting news from the science world as reported in The New York Times. A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light years away. The fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
The faint rising tone as physicist stated, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves. They are the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Albert Einstein predicted a century ago. Thus, it completed his vision of a universe in which space and time are dynamic and interwoven, able to stretch, jiggle and shrink. It’s a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes which is the most foreboding part of his theory.
Conveyed by the gravitational waves, power 50 times greater than the output of all stars in the universe combined vibrated a pair of L-shaped antennas in Washington State and Louisiana known as LIGO last September 14.
Worldwide members of the LIGO group that includes scientists from a European team known as the Virgo Collaboration published the report in Physical Review Letters with more than 1,000 authors.
The discovery is a great triumph for three physicists namely Kip Thorne of California Institute of technology, Ronald Drever formerly of Caltech and now living in Scotland and Rainer Weiss of MIT. These three scientists bet their careers on the dream of measuring the most ineffable of Einstein’s notions.
The news of LIGO’s success was met by praises in the scientific community, even though it still requires the need for confirmation or replication.
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Featured Image Credit: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL