UPDATE: 10:00 AM CST
In what some are calling the scientific discovery of the decade, scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) announced Thursday morning that they had for the first time observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes.
According to BBC News, the landmark discovery of these so-called gravitational waves, first theorized by Einstein a century ago as part of his General Theory of Relativity, comes following decades of searching for the elusive phenomena. It could mark the dawning of a new era in the field of astronomy and shed new light on the Big Bang itself, the website added.
Thursday’s announcement follows nearly a month of speculation that gravitational waves had indeed been detected, and was made official after scientists involved with the LIGO project spent weeks reviewing the data to verify that the signals were accurate, said Gizmodo. The findings are to be published in an upcoming edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.
Discovery could radically change the way we view the universe
During the press conference, the LIGO team confirmed that the gravitational waves had been observed at 5:51am Eastern time on September 14th of last year by both of the detectors, which are located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. The source of the waves was a collision of supermassive black holes that look place more than one billion light years away.
Professor Karsten Danzmann of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany, one of the European heads of the LSC, told BBC News that the detection would go down as one of the most important scientific discoveries since scientists at CERN confirmed the detection of the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider.
“There is a Nobel Prize in it – there is no doubt,” he told the British media outlet. “It is the first ever direct detection of gravitational waves; it’s the first ever direct detection of black holes and it is a confirmation of General Relativity because the property of these black holes agrees exactly with what Einstein predicted almost exactly 100 years ago.”
“Gravitational waves provide a completely new way at looking at the Universe,” added Professor Steven Hawking, one of the planet’s foremost experts on black holes. “The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionize astronomy. This discovery is the first detection of a black hole binary system and the first observation of black holes merging… We may even see relics of the very early Universe during the Big Bang at some of the most extreme energies possible.”
ORIGINAL: 8AM CST
Scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) have called a press conference for later this morning where they are expected to announce that they have discovered the faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime known as gravitational waves.
In a media advisory sent out earlier this week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) said that it would be issuing “a status report” on research being conducted using the recently upgraded Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), a facility dedicated to the search for the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
Assuming that the announcement is indeed confirmation that these spacetime ripples have been discovered, it would come during the 100th anniversary of the inaugural publication of Einstein’s predictions, and experts say that it would mark the dawn of a whole new kind of astronomy.
What are gravitational waves, and how does LIGO look for them?
As mentioned previously, gravitational waves are faint ripples in the very fabric of spacetime that Einstein believed would be produced as a result of his general theory of relativity. Basically, he explained that they would be created if a large mass is moved very suddenly, if two massive objects (black holes, for instance) suddenly collided, or if a supernova exploded.
The more mass an object possessed, the greater its impact on the surrounding spacetime would be, according to Gizmodo. Before LIGO, scientists lacked the ability to directly detect the waves, but the observatory’s multi-kilometer-scale gravitational wave detectors use laser interferometry to measure the ripples by having facilities in Washington and Louisiana work at the same time.
LIGO was designed and build by a team of scientists from Caltech, MIT and collaborators from more than 80 scientific institutions across the country, according to the project’s official website. It was recently upgraded as part of the Advanced LIGO project, which increased the sensitivity and observational range exponentially and increased the number of observable galaxies by 1,000 times – leading to the discovery expected to be announced later on this morning.
So why is the discovery of gravitational waves such a big deal?
According to Scientific American, Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, a leading expert in the field of general relativity, once said that the detection and analysis of gravitational waves would “create a revolution of our view of the universe comparable to or greater than that which resulted from the discovery of radio waves.”
Finding radio waves ultimately resulted in the discovery of radio galaxies, astrophysical black holes and quasars, the website noted, and finding and studying gravitational waves “could be similarly transformative because it would mark the beginning of an era in which scientists can use gravitational waves just as they use electromagnetic radiation – as a means of observing the cosmos.” So, yeah, it would be kind of a big deal.
The discovery could also drastically improve our ability to study black holes, and according to a Forbes report, the radiation produced as massive particles move through gravitational fields (also known as gravitational radiation) could lead to the discovery of orbital decay around systems that are stronger than our own, including black holes in the process of merging.
If today’s announcement is indeed the discovery of gravitational waves, the website said, it will confirm “that Einstein’s relativity is right, that gravitational radiation is real, and that merging black holes not only produce them, but that these waves can be detected. It’s a whole new type of astronomy – one that doesn’t use telescopes – and a whole new way to view black holes, neutron stars, and other objects that are otherwise mostly invisible.”
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Feature Image: Screenshot from YouTube live press conference/NSF
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