(Newswire.net — February 15, 2016) — “Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze of Caltech, executive director of LIGO, at a press conference in Washington, D.C.
Scientists have observed the “twisting” of space and time caused by the collision of two black holes which happened approximately 1.3 billion years ago.
An international team of scientists claim that this first detection of gravitational waves opens up a new era of astronomy, reported the BBC.
The experiment, worth millions, was implemented in 2002 by an international team of scientists. Based on assumptions in the General Theory of Relativity of Albert Einstein, published in 1916, and with the help of lasers, they search for the gravitational wave phenomenon.
The theoretical physicist predicted the existence of gravitational waves – ripples in the curvature of spacetime which propagate as waves, travelling outward from the source. Gravitational waves transport energy as gravitational radiation, but until now, there had been no confirmation of their existence.
The waves were detected on September 14th, 2015. Since then, up until February of this year, scientists have been evaluating their findings to make sure they are accurate.
Kip Thorne, one of the founders of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) project said that scientists in the past could see only warped spacetime when it’s very calm, adding that it was as if they had only ever seen a calm ocean, never roiled in a storm with crashing waves.
This new discovery is important as it confirms the existence of black holes.
Thorne said it is a discovery that deserves the Nobel prize.
Professor Karsten Danzmann, from the Max Planck Institute, said that this discovery is one of the most important events in science since the discovery of the Higgs particle.
Team member Prof. Gabriela González, Louisiana State University, said that the discovery of Einstein’s gravitational waves is just the beginning of the road, and added that scientists will begin listening to the Universe.
Gravitational waves that reach the Earth are extremely weak and their direct detection requires extremely sensitive detectors. Currently, the most sensitive detector of gravitational waves is LIGO, which consists of two observatories – one in Livingston, Louisiana, and the other in Richland, Washington. Besides them, there are other detectors of gravitational waves: VIRGO (Italy), GEO 600 (Germany) and TAMA 300 (Japan), whose construction began in the mid nineties.