![]() He called it a testament to strength of the theory. Rainer Weiss, who co-founded the experiment with Kip Thorne, said he found it amazing that the field equations work in such diverse gravitational environments, equally well at the scale of the solar system, and now, as this work shows, in the intense extreme environment of merging black holes. Luckily, a billion years previously, the collision of these orbiting black holes sent out a ripple that travelled at the speed of light until it finally delivered the news to Earth last September, right on time. It arrived soon after a major equipment upgrade at LIGO while the observatories were still in a preliminary setup mode, like a live action test run. So what they needed was a cosmic event that involved a lot of stuff moving very fast, which is precisely the sort of thing astronomers are most interested in, not just in colliding black holes and exploding stars, but also the greatest shock wave of all time - the grand inflation of the Big Bang. For experimentalists, however, only the biggest of these waves have any hope of triggering their detectors. In theory, space-time ripples at all scales when mass is in motion, from a waving hand to the Earth’s orbit of the Sun. ![]() The century since has seen many efforts to detect the biggest of these waves, with some indirect success. ![]() This theory introduced the concept of a four-dimensional structure to the universe, known as space-time, and it predicted that waves could ripple through this structure, like a swell on the ocean or sound through the air. Most importantly, though, it was the first direct observation of a gravitational wave, a concept predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein. It marked the first time a binary black hole system has been observed merging into one. ![]() This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |