The scientific community is losing it’s shit rn.
Gravitational waves – tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time first proposed by Albert Einstein a century ago – have been directly observed for the first time, a team of scientists announced this morning.
“We have directed gravitational waves,” said Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) executive director David Reitze at a press conference this morning. “We did it.
“It took us months of careful checking, rechecking, analysis. This is not just about the detection of gravitational waves … what’s really exciting is what comes next.
“I think we’re opening a window on the universe.”
The birth of gravitational wave astronomy! pic.twitter.com/UbMcJvOnHw
— LIGO (@LIGO) February 11, 2016
Almost immediately after turning on equipment that had taken 25 years of perfecting, scientists detected the gravitational waves caused by collision of two black holes – one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller – a full 1.3 billion years ago.
From a snatch of data 20 thousandths of a second long, they listened to the two black holes accelerating from circling around each other at 30 times a second to 250 times a second, before violently colliding.
It involved using instruments so sensitive that they could detect this movement of 10 to the minus 18 of a metre in a tenth of a second, which – as Aussie researcher on the project Professor David McClelland explained – is like being “able to measure our sun shift one human hair closer to the nearest star.”
The impacts are – wait for it – astronomical. Professor Alberto Vecchio, from the University of Birmingham and one of the researchers, said:
“This is transformational. We have observed the universe through light so far. But we can only see part of what happens in the universe. Gravitational waves carry completely different information about phenomena in the universe. So we have opened a new way of listening to a broadcasting channel which will allow us to discover phenomena we have never seen before.
“This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory.”
Dave Reitze: “Up until now, we have been deaf to the universe. Today, we are able to hear #GravitationalWaves for the first time.”
— LIGO (@LIGO) February 11, 2016
Source: LIGO Twitter / The Guardian / ABC.
Photo: APS Physics.
