At each facility lasers are beamed down tubes four kilometers long onto the smoothest silica mirrors ever made in order to detect the tiniest vibrations. The wave was detected by two separate specially built facilities in the US, one in Louisiana and the other 3,000km away in Washington State. The discovery has now finally been announced in the journal Physical Review Letters following months of painstaking work to verify the data. Physicists have been looking for gravitational waves ever since Einstein postulated their existence a hundred years ago as part of his theory of relativity. A hundred years after he theorised the existence of gravitational waves Albert Einstein has been proven categorically right. But an international collaboration of physicists in the US was straining to hear with the most sensitive listening devices known to humanity. By the time they reached us the vibrations were tiny - a thousand times less than the diameter of a proton, which itself is one million times smaller than an atom. ![]() ![]() Over one billion years ago, in a galaxy one billion light years from Earth, two black holes with a combined mass 65 times that of the sun collided sending out a wave of vibrations rippling through space-time, which passed through Earth on September 14 last year. So there will be stuff that we just can’t imagine.” “Hertz could never have imagined that we’d all be using radio waves on mobile phones and to update our Facebook accounts. Just like Heinrich Hertz, who demonstrated the existence of radio waves in the 1880s, he says today’s physicists can’t possibly know where this will ultimately lead. University of Melbourne astrophysicist Professor Andrew Melatos says gravitational waves create a whole new spectrum for observing the universe. “We know that every time in history when there is a discovery like this, once the knowledge is out there nature has this way of presenting opportunities.” “There will be countless applications that we can’t even begin to imagine today,” says Professor Melatos, a theoretical astrophysicist at the School of Physics. For this reason they are a powerful astronomical tool. For a start, gravitational waves pass easily through all matter meaning the signal can never be interrupted or blocked. ![]() He says it is inevitable that gravitational waves will be harnessed to create undreamt of new technologies. The history of the Big Bang and its immediate aftermath is shrouded because the universe then was too dense to transmit light. Picture: NASA/JPL-CaltechĪstronomers will even be able to use gravitational waves to look back in time to the early stages of the beginnings of the universe and the Big Bang. Artist’s depiction of a supermassive black hole surrounded by a swirling disk of material falling onto it. It amounts to the discovery of a whole new spectrum through which to observe phenomena that will lead to unimaginable new technologies and knowledge.īy detecting gravitational waves astronomers will for the first time be able to actually see and explore the secrets of mysterious phenomena like black holes and neutron stars, says University of Melbourne physicist Professor Andrew Melatos, a member of the international team that has now discovered gravitational-waves and directly confirmed Einstein’s theory. ![]() Physicists have detected vibrations from a massive collision of two black holes over a billion years ago in what is the incredible direct discovery of gravitational waves – Albert Einstein’s theoretical but previously undetected ripples in space-time.
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