Gravitational Waves Discovered from Colliding Black Holes
About 1.3 billion years ago two black holes swirled closer and closer together until they crashed in a furious bang. Each black hole packed roughly 30 times the mass of our sun into a minute volume, and their head-on impact came as the two were approaching the speed of light. The staggering strength of the merger gave rise to a new black hole and created a gravitational field so strong that it distorted spacetime in waves that spread throughout space with a power about 50 times stronger than that of all the shining stars and galaxies in the observable universe. Such events are, incredibly, thought to be common in space, but this collision was the first of its kind ever detected and its waves the first ever seen. Scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced today at a much-anticipated press conference in Washington, D.C. (one of at least five simultaneous events held in the U.S. and Europe) that the more than half-century search for gravitational waves has finally succeeded.
“This was truly a scientific moonshot, and we did it, we landed on the moon,” LIGO executive director David Reitze said during the announcement.
“There are people who’ve put their entire life into this search, and there are people who died before having a chance to see anything,” says LIGO team member Szabolcs Márka, a physicist at Columbia University. “It’s really a wonderful feeling that you have validated the investment of the tremendous amount of work. And it’s not just that you found something, but you gave something to everybody, to the rest of the human race.”
Albert Einstein first predicted gravitational waves in 1916 based on his general theory of relativity, but even he waffled about whether or not they truly exist. Scientists began seeking these ripples in spacetime in the 1960s but none succeeded in measuring their effects on Earth until now. LIGO’s discovery, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters, not only provides the first direct evidence for gravitational waves but also opens the door to using them to study the powerful cosmic events that create them. “It’s a huge deal,” says Luis Lehner, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario who is unaffiliated with the LIGO project. “It has pushed the fundamental theory of gravity forward in a very strong way and gives us an incredible tool to probe very deep questions of the universe.”
I am so fucking delighted. Watching that press conference felt like some dramatic scene out of a movie, except this is REAL.
Also Kip Thorne is just wonderful to listen to.
Holy fuck! This is awesome news!
